One Nation Under Blackmail Vol 1& 2 Whitney Alyse Webb

i a E”

The sordid union between Intelligence and

Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein

The sordid union between Intelligence and
Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein

ONE NATION UNDER

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey
Epstein, Volume One.
Copyright © 2022 Whitney Webb. All Rights Reserved.

Published by:

Trine Day LLC

PO Box $77
Walterville, OR 97489
1-800-556-2012

www. IrineDay.com
trineday@icloud.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945071

Webb, Whitney

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey
Epstein, Volume One.— Ist ed.

p. cm.

Epub (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-303-2

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-301-8

1. Epstein, Jeffrey, -- 1953-2019. 2. Epstein, Jeffrey, -- 1953-2019 -- Friends and associates. 3. Extortion --
United States 1940-2022. 3. Organized Crime -- United States. 5. Organized Crime -- Canada. 6. Intelligence
services -- United States. 7. Espionage. 8. POLITICAL SCIENCE / Corruption & Misconduct. 9.
Truthfulness and falsehood -- Political aspects. 10. Espionage -- Israel -- United States. 11. Sex scandals --
Political aspects -- United States. 12. TRUE CRIME / Sexual Assault. I. Title First Edition

FIRST EDITION
10987654321

Distribution to the Trade by:
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PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

PROSPERO: But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,
I here could pluck his highness’ frown upon you

And justify you traitors: at this time

I will tell no tales.

SEBASTIAN: The devil speaks in him.
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

I want something embarrassing! Something sexual! Little boys, midgets, that
sort of thing! Cows! I don't give a goddamn!
— Sam Elliott as Kermit Newman, The Contender

“Where's my Roy Cohn?”
- Donald Trump, New York Times, January 4, 2018

hy do folks lie, cheat and steal? Is it simply the survival of the fittest? What
about our rule of law and the hoary moral codes left to us? Are they worth
the paper they are printed on? Will we ever learn?

Whitney Webb takes us on a hidden history excursion — beyond the realm of
the gatekeepers — delving into a deep netherworld where disgraceful actions
seemingly trump noble principles. One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union
Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein is a tour de force. A
deep exposé into how the world actually works.

I will never forget my introduction to this underworld: a “talk” with my
“spooky” father and his professor friend from Vanderbilt. It was a reality beyond
my ken, way further than my teen-age experience. So I simply went on with
growing up, but looking in the dark corners.

My education was through reading, magazine articles and books — so many
books. There was much going on in the late 1960s and 70s. My father and his
friend had talked about an activity I call “CIA-Drugs,” and about “political forces,”
using psychological warfare to move agendas.

It soon became apparent that within this milieu there were many players:
intelligence agencies and their operatives, criminal gangs, secret societies, bag
men, money launderers, financial institutions and governments.

As my studies into intelligence matters and protocols progressed, I became
aware of “honey-traps” and the use of blackmail to compromise individuals and
stilt honest political discourse. It floored me that there were, it appeared, federal
agents running interference to some of the operations. Where was the country
and the values I had been taught? How did we get here?

“It’s far more constructive to work for the church than to work for the Central
Intelligence Agency. When you work for the CIA the ends justify the means,” my
father was quoted in a local paper a few years before his passing.

Immoral methods skew our futures and lead to imbalance. Leaving us ruled by
“rich men who are not quite respectable.’

British historian Eric Hobsbawm opined, “He [Roy Cohn] made his legal and
political career in a milieu where money and power override rules and law -
indeed where the ability to get, and get away with, what lesser citizens cannot, is
what proves membership of an elite.”

A corrupt elite debasing our future. Trying to bully us into their depravity.
With this book and others we can become educated and empowered to right our
ship-of-state.

Whitney has done her homework and A Nation Under Blackmail shows with
great alacrity the past actions, present situations, and future problems that we face.
And must deal with in order to fulfill our founder’s aspirations, foster current
needs, and forsee our children’s future.

A blackmailer believes that they are “in control,’ but secrets can cut many
ways, and ultimately we are in the driver's seat. What will we do?

Onwards to the Utmost of Futures!
Peace,

R.A. “Kris” Millegan

Publisher

TrineDay

August 18, 2022

CONTENTS

Introduction

1) The Underworld

2.) Booze and Blackmail

3) | Organized Crime and the State of Israel
4) Roy Cohn’s “Favor Bank”

5)_Shades of Gray

6)_A Private CIA

7) A Killer Enterprise

8) Clinton Contra

9) High Tech Treason

10) Government by Blackmail: The Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era
Documents

Index

INTRODUCTION, VOLUME 1

he July 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and his subsequent death that August

brought national as well as international attention to a sex ring where certain
members of the power elite sexually abused and exploited female minors and
young women. Epstein’s death, officially ruled a suicide, has been treated
skeptically by many, for a variety of reasons. Regardless of the real circumstances
of his death, it has led to scores of Americans embracing the view that his death
was both intentional and necessary to protect his powerful co-conspirators and
the full extent of his covert and illegal activities.

Even if one chooses not to entertain such disconcerting possibilities, it is quite
apparent that most of those who aided or enabled Epstein will never see the inside
of a prison cell. Though Ghislaine Maxwell is now serving a 20 year sentence,
others known to have been intimately involved in his illegal activities continue to
enjoy protection from the so-called “sweetheart deal,” or plea deal that followed
Epstein’s first run-in with the law for his sex trafficking activities in the mid-2000s.
In addition, Ghislaine Maxwell’s recent trial saw information involving third
parties redacted, leading many to believe that the public will never know the
names of the “johns” or clients, who benefitted from the sex trafficking activities of
Epstein and Maxwell and who were potentially blackmailed by them.

Yet, for both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, there is much more to the
story. This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as
Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump
transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal”
because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US
attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the
time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to
“intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence
asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm or deny the claim.

Other hints of a connection between Epstein and intelligence subsequently
emerged, with reporting from a variety of sources that Epstein was afhliated with

the CIA, Israeli intelligence, or both. Despite the implications and significance of
these connection(s) to intelligence, most of mainstream media declined to dig
deeper into these claims, instead largely focusing on the salacious aspects of the
Epstein case. The narrative soon became that Epstein was an anomaly, the sole
mastermind of an industrial sex trafficking enterprise and a talented con artist.
Even his closest associates and benefactors, like retail billionaire Leslie Wexner,
have been taken at their word that they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, even
when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.

Indeed, it was later stated by Cindy McCain, wife of former Senator John
McCain, that “we all knew what he [Epstein] was doing” at an event in January
2020, where she also claimed that authorities were “afraid” to properly apprehend
him. If he was such an anomaly and a stand-alone con artist —- how was he
singlehandedly able to intimidate the law enforcement apparatus of an entire
nation for decades? The claim that Epstein did not have powerful backers and
benefactors stands on incredibly shaky ground.

Oddly enough, mainstream reporting on Epstein was once relatively open
about his alleged intelligence ties, with British media reporting as early as 1992
and throughout the early 2000s that Epstein had ties to both US and Israeli
intelligence. In addition, also in the early 1990s, Epstein’s name was mysteriously
dropped from a major investigation into one of the largest Ponzi schemes in
history even though he was labeled the mastermind of that swindle in grand jury
testimony. Around the same time, subsequently released White House visitor logs
show that Epstein visited the Clinton White House 17 times, accompanied on
most of these visits by a different, attractive young woman. Reporting on those
visitor logs was largely done by a single media outlet, Britains The Daily Mail,
with hardly any American mainstream media outlets bothering to investigate
these revelations about Epstein and a former US president.

Why was Epstein so heavily protected from justice for decades - in
connection to both his sex trafficking crimes and his financial crimes? Why have
the once commonly reported intelligence connections of Jeffrey Epstein now been
relegated to “conspiracy theory” despite evidence to the contrary? If powerful
Senators knew what Epstein was doing to young women and girls — who else knew
and why wasn't something done?

This two-volume book endeavors to show why Jeffrey Epstein was able to
engage in a series of mind-boggling crimes for decades without incident. Far from
being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have

engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information
(ie. “intelligence) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their
activities and securing their compliance. Most of these individuals, including
Epstein himself, have their roots in the covert world where organized crime and
intelligence have intermingled and often cooperated for the better part of the last
90 years, if not longer. Perhaps most shockingly, these men are all interconnected
to various degrees.

Following the formal establishment of the organized crime-intelligence in
World War II through what is today remembered as Operation Underworld, the
relationship between these two entities has since become so intertwined and so
symbiotic that, today, it is nearly impossible to know where one ends and the
other begins. As this book will show, many of the biggest scandals and events of
the last century have not only been tied to these networks, but many of them also
have counted with the involvement of sex traffickers and blackmailers, Epstein
among them. Publicly, these men have been powerful lawyers, businessmen and
lobbyists. Their more clandestine and shadowy activities, though a matter of
record, are often known only to those who are well read on certain historical
events or in the field of “deep politics.”

In order to understand Jeffrey Epstein and his activities in their full context,
one must understand his powerful contacts and the structures that protected him.
Those structures and those networks did not begin with Jeffrey Epstein and they
also did not die with him. In revealing his broader milieu, and that of his past
associates and clients, one is left not only with a damning indictment of Jeffrey
Epstein, but a damning indictment of American institutions, particularly those
involved in “national security” matters and law enforcement. We cannot properly
address the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, nor prevent them being committed by others
in the future, unless we grapple with the covert power structures that have long
wielded blackmail, bribes and assassinations as their weapons of choice to corrupt
and control public institutions while manipulating and looting the public.

Jeffrey Epstein was not an anomaly and his activities represent just the tip of
the veritable iceberg.

Whitney Webb, 8/14/22

á ho are these people? They are the group that is popularly called the

Enterprise. They are in and outside [the] CIA. They are mostly Right
Wing Republicans, but you will find a mix of Democrats, mercenaries, ex officio
Mafia and opportunists within the group. They are CEOs, they are bankers, they
are presidents, they own airlines, they own national television networks. They
own six of the seven video documentary companies of Washington, DC and they
do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the
Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and
lied to.

They abhor sunlight and love darkness. They deal in innuendo and character
assassination, and planted stories, the incomplete thought and sentence. They
burn and shred files if caught, they commit perjury, and when caught they have
guaranteed sinecures with large US corporations.

If you let them, they will take over not only [the] CIA but the entire
government and the world, cutting off dissent, free speech, a free media, and they
will cut a deal with anyone, from [the] Mafia to Saddam Hussein, if it means more
power and money. They stole $600 billion from the S & Ls and then diverted our
attention to the Iraqis. They are ripping off America at a rate never before seen in
history. They flooded our country with drugs from Central America during the
1980s, cut deals with Haro in Mexico, Noriega in Panama, and the Medillin and
Cali cartels, and Castro, and recently the Red Mafia in the KGB.

They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will
blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes?

-Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990

CHAPTER 1

THE UNDERWORLD

OF SPIES AND CROOKS

t 2:30 in the afternoon on February 9th, 1942, a fire broke out on-board the

Normandie, a ship that was then in the process of being converted into a
troop transporter in New York City’s harbor. As the flames roared, winter winds
fanned the flames, spiraling the fire up, and then down onto the ship’s top decks.
Within hours, the Normandie began to lean to her port side, weighed down by the
water that was being dumped onto the boat by fire crews. Soon, the ship capsized
and an expensive, unprecedented salvage operation was mounted. Despite these
efforts, repairing the ship was soon found to be too complicated and too costly,
and the Normandie was scrapped in 1946.

Investigations into the destruction of the Normandie quickly revealed that the
cause of the disaster had been incompetence and carelessness. Yet, nevertheless,
rumors grew that it had been the work of German saboteurs, who were intent on
disrupting America’s early war efforts. Proponents of these theories argued that
the alleged saboteurs sought to break down the country’s logistical capabilities
through attacks in ports and harbors as well as factories and other strategic,
industrial locations. William B. Herlands, the then-New York Commissioner of
Investigation, summed up the spirit of the times when he said, “We are faced with
a grave national emergency.... A blackout was imposed over the ... waterfront
area within the Third Naval district, which included New York and New Jersey.
Many of our ships were being sunk by enemy submarines off the Atlantic Coast ...
and the outcome of the war hung in the balance.”

Management and regulation of these critical harbors and coastlines was the
responsibility of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). An ONI inquiry was
opened in May 1942 into potential saboteurs and Nazi agents operating in the
ports and the possibility of U-boat movements off the east coast. The man tasked

with overseeing this inquiry was C. Radcliff Haffendon.2 Several of the agents
assigned to work under Hafftendon had previously worked with Thomas E. Dewey,
the US State Attorney who later served as governor of New York. Dewey was best
known for his prosecution of organized crime, and through these contacts,
Haffendon learned of the role played by gangsters and other criminal elements on
the New York City waterfront. Dewey's chief of staff, attorney Frank Hogan,
suggested to Haffendon and the ONI that they speak with a man named Joseph
“Joe Socks” Lanza.

Lanza was officially a “business agent for the United Seafood Workers Union.”
He was also a mobster in his own right and was known as the “rackets boss of the
Fulton Fish Market ... in downtown New York City” Yet, compared to the
stature of other criminal figures in the city, Lanza was a small-fry, and he knew it.
As a result, he ended up telling the ONI that they would have better luck higher
up the food chain. He suggested either Meyer Lansky, who controlled the
longshoreman’s union, or Frank Costello, a gambling figure with numerous
interests throughout the waterfront. But to get to them, Lanza told Haffendon, he
would need to first speak to Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

Luciano, at the time, was locked away in prison, having been put there by
Thomas Dewey. A delicate series of negotiations were subsequently launched in
what is now known as “Operation Underworld.” This operation, which the
government was forced to reluctantly acknowledge after decades of public denials,
involved the recruitment of high-level organized crime figures for work with
American intelligence services, justified by war-time necessity. Not long after
Operation Underworld had been given the go-ahead, Luciano agreed to the ONI’s
requests, and his prison cell soon became a hub for meetings between him and his
criminal associates, meetings in which they would coordinate counter-intelligence
activities with the Navy.

Despite Operation Underworld’s initial and relatively narrow objectives, the
scope of the operation organically expanded. Before long, Luciano and his
colleagues — Meyer Lansky, chief among them — were helping the ONI cultivate
intelligence for the Allied invasion of Sicily. Lower ranking mob figures and
immigrants were frequently brought to Haffendon’s offices for questioning.
Names and contact information for friendly Sicilians, many of whom were Mafia
figures, were provided to ONI agents for use in the military campaign. While the
resulting collaborations between the Mafia and the military on the beaches and in

the villages of Sicily have slipped into legend, the legacy of Operation Underworld
has endured and undeniably forever altered the United States of America, and
beyond. Indeed, Operation Underworld was the beginning of the creation of a
new underworld entirely, one built on the cooperation, if not outright symbiosis,
between organized crime and American intelligence.

SHADOWY ALLIANCES

Lb Luciano was born in Sicily in 1897 and arrived on American shores in

1906. At a young age, he formed his own gang, which offered protection to
Jewish immigrants from Italian and Irish organized crime elements in exchange
for small fees. This protection, unsurprisingly, was tantamount to extortion, and
the money he accrued allowed him to begin expanding into other rackets —
including, notably, prostitution. Early on, he met and formed an alliance with
another young gangster named Frank Costello, an immigrant from Calabria, Italy.
Together, the two consolidated their power by taking control of the numerous
environs now considered typical of organized crime: prostitution, narcotics, and
even organized labor in New York City’s docks.

As their business expanded, so too did their revenue. Soon, Luciano and his
cohorts were being propelled to the heights of power in New York City. Thomas
Dewey once commented that Luciano’s “business was far-flung and brought in a
colossal revenue. This was estimated to be far, far in excess of $12 million a year.”*
Key to Luciano and Costello's operation was the fact that it had overcome the
traditional bifurcation of organized crime into ethnic enclaves. For the first time,
in Luciano’s growing criminal empire, Italian, Jewish, and Irish criminal networks
intermingled and cooperated with one another. However, this early cooperation
lacked the cohesion and integration that the networks born out of Luciano’s and
Costello's enterprise would develop in the years to come.

Joining Luciano and Costello in their criminal enterprise was Meyer Lansky
and his close friend, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Lansky was well-connected in
Jewish mob circles, and he, along with Siegel, had amassed significant wealth
during the Prohibition era. Lansky, whose long shadow is cast across the entire
history of organized crime in the twentieth century, was something of a visionary.
Various accounts paint him as the intellectual architect behind the multi-ethnic
organized crime model that Luciano successfully pursued. Lansky was also

instrumental in bringing mob groups into the world of gambling, helping set up
casinos in the Caribbean that would be utilized to wash the money generated by
their various vices and rackets. Perhaps most important of all was that Lansky had
also helped develop the use of a complex banking network, which he adopted in
an effort to avoid the fate of Al Capone. After all, Capone had not been taken
down not for murder or extortion, but for tax evasion.

This Luciano-Costello-Lansky-Siegel alliance was the basis of what
subsequently became known as the National Crime Syndicate. Far from the well-
organized image of the Mafia often promoted by the media, the National Crime
Syndicate operated loosely at best — and, according to some commentators, did
not actually exist in any meaningful way. Such arguments might be going a step
too far, although they are worth considering. The National Crime Syndicate might
be best understood as a social network - a sprawling, faction-filled web of
associations and organizations that either collaborated or competed, depending
on the situation or the spoils.

In 1936, this emerging crime network took what, at first glance, appeared to
be a major blow following the arrest and successful prosecution of Luciano by
Thomas E. Dewey in a spectacular, if not sensational, trial. Luciano’s apparent
downfall came via an assault on New York City’s prostitution rackets, which his
organization firmly controlled. As Alfred McCoy summarizes, “Dewey’s
investigators felt that the forced prostitution charge would be more likely to
offend public sensibilities and secure a conviction.”> A handful of prostitutes who
worked in Luciano’ brothels testified against him, and a New York court quickly
sentenced the gangster “to a thirty-to-fifty year jail term.”

Dewey’s role in this affair is quite interesting. Six years later, when he ran to
secure the presidential nomination for the Republican Party, he joined forces with
John Foster Dulles, the brother of Allen Dulles — best known for his role as the
first civilian head of the CIA in the early years of the Cold War. Dulles, a member
of the “internationalist” camp of American politics that typified the attitudes of
the elite “Eastern Establishment,’ impressed upon Dewey the importance
overcoming the isolationist factions of the Republican Party.°,2 What Dulles got
in exchange for his steering of Dewey in pursuit of political power was his own rise
through the ranks of the party, ultimately culminating in his service as President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State.

Even more curious was an investment that Dewey made, during the 1950s, in
an entity called the Mary Carter Paint Company, later renamed Resorts
International. Mary Carter was controlled by the Crosby family, and its operations
were overseen by the most practical-minded of the family’s sons, James Crosby.
Mary Carter was deeply tied to organized crime networks. ? It worked closely in
developing businesses in the Bahamas, hand-in-hand with a number of Meyer
Lansky frontmen, while James’ brother, Peter Crosby, was a notorious confidence
man with an impressive roster of criminal contacts. It had also been widely
rumored that Mary Carter was a CIA front company.?2

THE OSS

urking in the background of Operation Underworld, which had seen the ONI

directly recruit Luciano, was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
wartime forerunner to the CIA and America’s first robust national intelligence
organization. The precise role that the OSS played in the affair isn’t exactly clear.
According to George White, a notorious agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
who had been recruited into the OSS, he had been propositioned by an organized
crime associate to enlist Luciano in exchange for a pardon — but this was a bridge
too far. An alliance between the OSS and “a person of Luciano’s reputation ‘would
be a very naive way of doing business’ ... White maintained that he felt it was
outrageous to entertain ... [the] proposition, ‘even for the OSS’ who were willing
to do almost anything” =

White would make these statements in the course of Federal testimony, and,
in all likelihood, he was lying to protect the OSS. According to Richard Harris
Smith, an historian of the OSS, Earl Brennan, an OSS officer in Italy, was kept in
the loop regarding negotiations between Luciano and the ONI.“ Meanwhile,
Assistant District Attorney Murray Gurfein, who handled the legal end of the
Luciano negotiations, subsequently went to Europe to serve as a colonel in the
OSS.

The OSS was many things, operating in many different theaters. In Europe, it
ran a fairly unsuccessful paramilitary campaign. However, in the China-Burma-
India theater, its military operations achieved remarkable results. When it came to
spycraft, its supporters gushed with praise, while its detractors regarded the tales
later woven by its veterans as worthy of skepticism. The OSS was frequently — and

accurately — seen as a social club. While its ranks did boast a great many military
officers and figures from other government agencies like the FBI and the FBN, its
leadership and higher-ranking administrative posts tended to be secured by the
sons of the country’s wealthiest elite. In London, Madrid, Geneva, Paris and
elsewhere, posts were held by members of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, the
family behind the Gulf Oil fortune. Heirs of the Morgan family also secured
positions within the agency, as did members of the DuPont and the Vanderbilt
families.

“Only the Rockefellers were conspicuously absent” from the OSS, writes
Richard Harris Smith, adding that “Nelson [Rockefeller] headed his own agency,
the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs”/° David Rockefeller, Nelson’s brother,
also reportedly ran his own intelligence apparatus during the war.“*

The agency itself was something of brainchild — at least partially — of General
William J. Donovan, a prominent New York City anti-trust lawyer and veteran of
World War I. Along with figures like Dewey and Dulles, Donovan was the
consummate “Eastern Establishment” insider. He maintained a deep
preoccupation with organization and rationalization, which filtered into his work
defending the trusts and combines that dotted the corporate landscape of his day.
He was also a firm internationalist when it came to his political outlook. During
the inter-war years, Donovan had acted as an agent for various corporate interests,
and had even traveled to Russia on behalf of the Morgans to collect information
on the developments of the Bolshevik Revolution.*®

In the course of his wartime intelligence work, Donovan was first appointed
by President Roosevelt to head the Office of the Coordinator of Information
(COI), which was intended to help coordinate the scattered intelligence outfits
and military organizations that communicated infrequently and cooperated even
less. COI was the seed from which the OSS would later spring. Under Donovan's
direction, it became a clearinghouse for military and political propaganda. This
was in no small part thanks to Donovan's close friend, a British intelligence
operative named William Stephenson.

Stephenson was the wartime head of a British intelligence unit in the United
States, headquartered in New York City and known as the British Security
Coordination (BSC). He reported to Stewart Menzies, who was then serving as
the head of MI6. Menzies had tasked Stephenson with “establish[ing] relations on
the highest possible level between the British SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service,

another name for MI6] and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”!°

Stephenson and the BSC operated from an office located in Rockefeller Center’s
International Building, which was also the home of numerous, other BSC front
organizations. Stephenson also worked closely with other British intelligence
agencies, including MI6 itself and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which
had begun its life as Section D of MI6.

In agreement with Menzies’ mandate, Stephenson developed a close working
relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed to be enthusiastic about being a
liaison to British intelligence on matters concerning the war in Europe (at this
stage, the US had yet to enter the conflict). Reportedly, the BSC “provided the
FBI with over 100,000 confidential reports,’ while Hoover kept the British in the
loop with American reports on German naval movements and the like. The
relationship between Hoover and Stephenson would ultimately break down by
1941. Soon after, Stephenson began to cultivate William Donovan, who
increasingly challenged Hoover's position as the sole conduit between the
Americans and the British. When Donovan was appointed by Roosevelt as the
Coordinator of Information — and subsequently formed the OSS - an intense
bureaucratic struggle erupted between Hoover and his rivals. As will be discussed
in greater detail in the next chapter, this struggle allegedly led Donovan to
coordinate with organized crime kingpins, namely Meyer Lansky, to blackmail
Hoover in an effort to bring him to heel.

Stephenson did more than simply cultivate Donovan. In 1940, he reported
back to his handlers in England that “There is no doubt we can achieve infinitely
more through Donovan than through any other individual.... He is very receptive

.. and can be trusted to represent our needs in the right quarters and in the right
way in the U.S.A.”18 Donovan's COI and OSS were, in all actuality, the offspring of
these British-led efforts, and a great deal of the decisions Donovan made were
influenced by figures tied to Stephenson's BSC. Before the COI was up and
running, for example, Donovan conferred closely with Robert Sherwood, a
playwright, ardent interventionist and close confidant of President Roosevelt. “On
June 16, 1941)” writes Thomas Mahl, “Sherwood sent to Donovan a list of
people he thought he could trust, ‘for the work we discussed ... yesterday evening
at your home??? At the time, Sherwood was working closely with the BSC — even
sending them copies of speeches he had written for the president prior to
Roosevelt receiving them.

As efforts were undertaken to get the American intelligence apparatus up and
running, the BSC undertook a propaganda campaign aimed at garnering support
for such an institution. Mahl, in his book Desperate Deception, shows how BSC
assets seeded the idea throughout the mass media, which in turn was circulated up
to the heights of political power. One characteristic incident took place in May
1941, just a month prior to Donovan’s meeting with Sherwood. It was on 9" of
that May that:

Vincent Astor, FDR’s friend and New York area coordinator of intelligence, sent the president a
clipping from the New York Herald Tribune that was probably a plant to build the consensus for
voices calling for the plan British intelligence wanted. The Herald Tribune ... was BSC’s favorite
outlet for planted articles. Moreover, the putative author, George Fieling Eliot, was a devoted
British sympathizer, one of the most influential people in the BSC front Fight for Freedom, and
a favorite vehicle for planted articles. Citing the threat from fifth columnists and enemy agents,
Eliot pointed out with alarm at the lack of a coordinator for the FBI, ONI, and G-2

intelligence.

The idea of a “fifth column” was a prime component of BSC propaganda, and
would later be adopted by the OSS itself. It was used to attack isolationist
holdouts against American entry into the war, and was also used to generate fear
and create an atmosphere of distrust among the general public. The term
originated during the course of the early phase of the Spanish Civil War of the
1930s, and was used to describe something like a domestic military-in-waiting.
The fifth column was purported to be composed of enemy agents and their
sympathizers, with a mandate towards sabotage and other violent activities.
According to Mahl, one of the strongest promoters of the notion of a Nazi fifth
column active in America was a Chicago journalist and close associate of
Donovan named Edgar Ansel Mowrer - who was subsequently identified as an
asset of British intelligence.”

The fifth column, however, was simply an exaggerated threat. Axis sabotage
efforts within the United States did occur, but were limited and ultimately
ineffectual. Yet, this reality didn't matter to the BSC and its American allies, as the
promotion of fifth column fears had a legitimizing function for their activities. It
formed the very justification and popular base of support for the creation and
expansion of the emerging, organized intelligence apparatus.

It also spawned events like Operation Underworld. After all, it was the specter
of fifth column activity that had first prompted the collaboration between the
ONI and organized crime elements. Even more incredibly, it seems that the

legitimization gained by intelligence services through BSC propaganda ultimately
benefited these criminal networks as well. At the war’s end, naval intelligence
began a campaign to have Luciano released from prison — and at the beginning of
1946, the very man who had put Luciano away, Thomas Dewey, commuted the
mobster’s sentence in exchange for his deportation to Italy. In the year or two that
followed, numerous other gangsters — perhaps as many as a hundred - were
deported and joined him.

Luciano’s deportation was the beginning of an effort to cement in place a
powerful organized crime network that was transnational in scope and wedded to
the American intelligence services. Indeed, even though Luciano was no longer
physically in the United States, he and his ilk continued to guide organized
criminal activities from abroad while also establishing new rackets during their
exile in the “Old World.” Deported alongside Luciano, for instance, was Frank
Coppola, the powerful Detroit mob boss who had been something of a mentor to
Jimmy Hoffa, the mob-linked head of the Teamsters union (the use of the
Teamsters’ pension fund for organized crime-linked financing recurs throughout
this book). By the 1960s, Hoffa and the Teamsters were working closely alongside
the CIA, particularly on efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, who had seized many
of the mob’s casinos during the course of the Cuban revolution. Coppola himself
was linked to American intelligence: he “was said to have been behind a 1947 May
Day massacre in Sicily, allegedly financed by former OSS chief William Donovan,
in which eight people were killed and thirty-three wounded; 498 people, mostly
left-wingers, were killed in 1948 alone”?

Also deported was Silvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla, a Sicily-born mobster
who had arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the early 1900s and had become
the city’s boss. He was particularly close to the interests of New York City
organized crime. In the 1930s, Carolla had worked with Costello and Luciano to
provide New Orleans with slot machines under the watchful eye of their ally,
Huey Long. The gambling operation was so successful that it soon attracted the
attention of Lansky, and plans were put in motion to establish “centers of
communication and money laundering operations to be used by the underworld,
on a national scale, in New Orleans” This included the opening of “three big Las
Vegas-style gambling casinos” across Louisiana, and the introduction of a new,
rising star in the underworld into this partnership.

That rising star was Carlos Marcello. Soon, Marcello was managing the whole
of the Louisiana casino operation. When Carolla was deported to Sicily, Marcello
was tapped to take his place — and so began the reign of one of the most powerful
crime bosses of the twentieth century. “... [I]t was said,’ wrote John Davis in his
book Mafia Kingfish, “Frank Costello sent his blessing from New York, and Sam
Carolla sent word from Palermo that he approved Carlos’ selection as caretaker-
boss until he, Silver Dollar Sam, returned from exile”?

In Italy, Carolla linked up with Luciano in developing what was reported by
American law enforcement to be a large-scale drug network. As will be discussed
in Chapter 3, this network spanned the Middle East, Europe, and the United
States, and one particularly well-oiled pipeline of this network - one that
connected Lebanon to Sicily to Marseilles — was infamously known as the “French
Connection.” Curiously, Carolla and Luciano turned up in Mexico in 1948 to
oversee the development of a drug smuggling operation in that country. While
Mexico had its own domestic drug production, it was also a key transshipment
point for the flow of heroin, refined from opium produced in the East. Here, we
again find the fingerprints of cooperation between intelligence services and
organized crime.

THE DRUG CONNECTION AND “OPERATION X”

he story of the Chinas Green Gang is complicated, partially due to the

mixing of fact with rumor and legend. Yet, it is undeniable that their rise was
a consequence of the rapid transformations that shook Chinese society in the
early twentieth century. However, the Green gang itself began long before the
twentieth century dawned, originating as a secret society with roots stretching
back to Luoism, a folk religion that followed the teachings of Buddhist mystic Luo
Menghong. During the late 1700s, this particular branch of Luoism had become a
powerful force among boatmen whose trade was the transport of grain and other
foodstufts. Fearful of their growing power, authorities stepped in to suppress this
network, driving it underground. Once bitterly ensconced in the margins of
society, these Luoists began engaging in smuggling and formed alliances with
other smuggling groups. Soon, they consolidated their power and became a
formidable force in the world of crime.

Under the leadership of Du Yuesheng, the Green Gang helped bring to power
the Kuomintang (KMT), later known as the Nationalist Chinese, under the
direction of Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang himself was not a member of the Green
Gang, but his political mentor and protector, General Chen Ch’i-mei, had been.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, the Green Gang was fully integrated with the
government of Shanghai, and became a primary source of power for the KMT.
They “relied on the Green Gang to conduct counter-espionage activities and
gather political intelligence,’ and called upon the resources of the organization to
suppress trade unionists and communists.”

The Green Gang financed its activities through the cultivation and sale of
opium - an activity that was fully sanctioned by Chiang and the KMT. Prior to the
KMT’s rise to power, Chinese opium production was unorganized, distributed
among many different warring figures. Under Chiang, however, a “suppression”
was carried out with the ostensible goal of wiping out the opium trade in the name
of public health. Behind the scenes, however, the KMT was doing quite the
opposite: the “suppression” of opium production was actually an integrated effort
to centralize it, placing production, distribution and ultimately control of the
substance in the hands of a joint KMT-Green Gang monopoly.”8

Support for the KMT opium monopoly came from Western modernizers —
including the Rockefeller Foundation, which had set up shop in China during the
1910s with the creation of the China Medical Board.?? Through this apparatus,
the Rockefeller Foundation undertook efforts to promote “modern science,”
develop medical education programs, and set up hospitals. It is likely that the
foundation’s support for opium monopolization was intricately bound up with
their health crusade, since opium had important, wide ranging medicinal
applications.

At the same time, it was also part of a larger tendency among internationalists
like the Rockefellers to seek the regulation and control of the global drug trade.
After the First World War, the nascent League of Nations formed an Advisory
Committee on the Traffic of Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs. It worked
closely with the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board, the “parent”
of the China Medical Board. The overarching imperative of the League's efforts for
global drug regulation was to rationalize the production of opium and other
precursors and to consolidate drug refining and distribution within a series of
select major pharmaceutical corporations.

Under Chiang’s leadership, China simultaneously kowtowed to the League's
initiatives while using the monopolization drive to cement itself at the center of
drug production for both the criminal underworld and the “legitimate”
overworld. A full-blown narco-state was in the process of being formed, as opium
cultivation came to be the central focus of the government's revenue-raising
programs. As Jonathan Marshall noted:

“In the central provinces of China, especially in Hubei and Hunan, nearly every government
organization has come to depend on opium revenue for maintenance,’ observed one expert.
“Even law courts, Tangpus (Kuomintang organizations), and schools are no exception.” Thus in
one locality, authorities charged one picul of opium $320 for general taxes, $32 for Communist
suppression, $3.20 for national revenue, $1.50 for the Chamber of Commerce, $2.50 for Special
Goods (opium) Association fees, $2.50 for the Hsih-tsun Girl’s School, and $7.00 for protection
fees. Later, highway maintenance and more school taxes were added. When the opium finally
reached Hankou, monopoly authorities added another $920 tax. The original cost of the opium

was only $400.22

It was in this context that American organized crime figures arrived on China's
shores and began to organize an intensely lucrative global narcotics trading
network. Among the first was Arnold Rothstein, who acted as a mentor to Lansky,
Luciano, and Costello. He dispatched a series of frontmen to China: Sidney Stajer,
Jacob Katzenberg, and George Uffner*+ Uffner would later be described by
Federal investigators as a long-time friend of Costello, while Katzenberg was a
high-level figure in New York City’s Jewish crime syndicates. These syndicates,
according to Alfred McCoy, “controlled much of New York's heroin distribution.”
Katzenberg — himself a Lansky flunky as much as a Rothstein frontman — was
involved with a secret heroin processing laboratory in the city, which was refining
opium flowing from Asia.

Hans Derks, in his encyclopedic History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on
the East, 1600-1950, suggests that the connections between American organized
crime and the KMT/Green Gang-dominated Chinese opium trade more than
likely involved the complicity of Western — predominantly Anglo-American —
economic interests in the region.** He singles out in particular the powerful
Sassoon family.

Nicknamed the “Rothschilds of the East,” the Sassoons had emerged as
economic administrators in Iraq before organizing one of the dominant opium
trading complexes in the East. It is said, writes Derks, “that ‘one fifth of all opium
brought into China was shipped on the Sassoon fleet’ Thanks to opium they

became not only the wealthiest family in India, but also the largest real estate
dealers in Shanghai” The family also became integrated into the world of oil:
they invested heavily, at various times, in Britain's Burmah Oil and the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company (a subsidiary of Burmah that eventually became British
Petroleum), among others.

During the 1800s, the Sassoons competed for dominance of the opium trade
with Jardine-Matheson, one of the great Anglo-Hong Kong trading houses that
has been firmly controlled by the prominent Keswick family. Over time, the
interests of the Sassoons and the Keswicks intermingled and became part of a vast
network winding its way through Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere. This is by
no means ancient history: as late as 2013, the Financial Times reported that Lord
James Sassoon, having just finished a stint serving as the Commercial Secretary to
the Treasury in the government of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, became
an executive director of the Jardine-Matheson board.3$

These dynastic-corporate structures not only influenced the shape of the
international drug trade during the twentieth century, but also the evolution of
Western intelligence services during and after World War II. Take, for example, the
offspring of Henry Keswick, who served as one of the most powerful heads of
Jardine Matheson and the controller of numerous affiliated entities (such as the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the Hong Kong & Whampoa
Company, and the Shanghai Municipal Council). Two of Henry’s sons, John
Henry Keswick and William Johnston “Tony” Keswick, served in the Chinese
theater as part of the UK’s Special Operations Executive. In addition to the SOE,
John Henry Keswick served as the personal aide to Lord Mountbatten, the
Supreme Allied Commander of the Southern Asia Theater.2°

Tony Keswick, meanwhile, crossed paths with Federal Bureau of Narcotics
(FBN) veteran and OSS operative Garland Williams. When the OSS was still
being organized and efforts were underway to expand its paramilitary capacities,
Williams was dispatched by Preston Goodfellow — “a former Hearst executive and
publisher of Brooklyn Eagle” who had become William Donovan's special assistant
— to meet with the SOE officer. “After meeting the British spymaster Keswick,”
writes Douglas Valentine, “Williams returned to Washington with the SOE’s
training manuals and helped establish OSS training schools in Maryland and

Virginia”

After the war came to an end, Tony Keswick returned to the world of
corporate affairs, taking up a position running one of the family’s correspondent
companies in London. He also served, for a time, as a governor of the Hudson's
Bay Company in Canada. As discussed in the next chapter, the Hudson's Bay
Company was central to the rise of the Bronfman family, who have long straddled
the murky line between “legitimate” corporate enterprises and the criminal
underworld. In turn, the Bronfmans, as will be illustrated at length in this book,
would be important to the rise of the network that later enabled the illicit
activities of Jeffrey Epstein.

Through his acquisition of the SOE manuals from Keswick, Garland Williams
played an essential role that paralleled — and was almost certainly framed by - the
higher level cooperation between William Donovan and William Stephenson. At
the same time, Williams appears to have operated at the intersection of the
American intelligence services, still in their infancy, and the networks of American
organized crime.

In his book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott theorizes that
there existed a formation that he provisionally dubs “Operation X? Williams, and
other veterans of the FBN that were brought into the OSS and the CIA, are
identified as players in this apparatus:

... the intelligence-mob collaboration established with Operation Underworld did not end after
World War II. On the contrary, post-war narcotics operations overseas were subordinated to
anti-Communist activities; and they were used as a cover for ongoing use of mob assets, above
all drug traffickers, around the world. In developing these post-war mob contacts, White and his
FBN associates, notably his former supervisor Garland Williams, and his protégé Charles
Siragusa, even while formally back in the FBN hierarchy, ‘functioned as a counterintelligence
unit, attached to the CIA and, at times, the Army.... In the 1950s and 1960s it would appear that
the FBN systematically subordinated the prosecution of drug cases to a second, hidden agenda,

the use of traffickers as agents against communism.32

One example that Scott cites is the “selective arrests made by George White in
a 1959 heroin case involving the anti-Communist (and pro-Kuomintang) Hip
Sing tong or gang.”22 White, an agent for the FBN and OSS who was a contractor
for the CIA after the war, had busted a heroin ring operating out of San Francisco
that tracked back to these pro-KMT gangster elements — and then subsequently
identified the heroin as originating from Chinese Communists.*2 Interestingly,
White himself had a history with the Hip Sing tongs. “In 1936 he infiltrated the
notorious Hip Sing Tong brotherhood of Seattle by masquerading as a drug

dealer,’ leading to a massive sting operation that nabbed some thirty drug
smugglers and their associates.

It is worth saying a bit more about George White, who was no stranger to
courting the services of organized crime figures to bolster the early American
intelligence apparatus. The research carried out by the late Hank Albarelli has
shown that White cultivated a protégé named Pierre Laffite, who he had recruited

2.42 Twenty years prior, Lafitte

into the CIA as a “special employee” in June 195
worked in France for Jean Voyatzis, “the greatest importer of manufactured
Chinese opium into Europe” and a figure of considerable interest to the FBN.*8
Later, Lafitte turned up in Cuba in the company of Amleto Battisti y Lora, a
Corsican expat who had partnered with Meyer Lansky in a Havana hotel. Battisti,
according to a 1955 FBI memo, was “for many years ... known unofficially as the
numbers king of Havana.’+#

When White brought Lafitte to the CIA, the FBN agent was himself being
recruited by Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist who was working at the Agency's Office of
Technical Service. There, Gottlieb oversaw the CIA’s research into potential “truth
drugs,’ which in time expanded into a sweeping inquiry that dealt with the effects
of drugs, shock therapy and sensory deprivation, hypnosis and even more esoteric
currents on the human mind. The most famous of these programs, MK-ULTRA,
saw the CIA become the largest consumer of LSD, which it used to experiment on
witting and unwitting subjects. The subjects included soldiers, patients in
psychiatric hospitals, prisoners (sometimes organized crime figures), and private
citizens. Under Gottlieb’s directions, CIA-run “safehouses” were established in
New York City and San Francisco, where unsuspecting people were dosed with
hallucinogenic substances while being monitored from behind two-way mirrors.

Gottlieb was impressed by White's street smarts and his inclinations towards
the other side of the law — traits that were necessary for the covert drug program.
As one of Gottlieb’s Agency employees later stated, “We were Ivy League, white
middle class.... We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty expert.
He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs.... He was a
pretty wild man” Under the alias of “Morgan Hall,” White maintained a
safehouse in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he supplied unsuspecting
people with LSD and other substances. In order to lure people into his web, he
deployed false life stories - “He posed alternatively as a merchant seaman or a
bohemian artist, and consorted with a vast array of underworld characters, all of

whom were involved in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling and
pornography? 4£

In 1955, Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the FBN, transferred White
to San Francisco to fill a vacant post as the FBN district supervisor for the city.
This was by no means the end of his work with Gottlieb and the CIA. Instead, he
was granted control of MK-ULTRA Subproject 42 - or, as White called it,
“Operation Midnight Climax.” Midnight Climax involved a safehouse, much like
the one set up in New York City, which was then decked out with electronic
surveillance equipment. Prostitutes were then enlisted, who would lure
unsuspecting clients back to the “pad,” where they would then be slipped LSD.
John Gittinger, a Harvard psychologist who was on the CIA payroll — best known
perhaps for developing the Personality Assessment System — later admitted in
Congressional testimony that the Agency “was interested in the combination of
certain drugs with sex acts. We looked at the various pleasure positions used by
prostitutes and others.... Some of the women, the professionals, we used, were
very adept at this practice.”

White wasn't alone in obscuring the role of the KMT in the drug trade. This
was also the modus operandi of Harry Anslinger, the FBN commissioner who
served as boss to both George White and Garland Williams. Although Anslinger —
like Donovan - was a bitter enemy of J. Edgar Hoover, he rode the rising tide of
McCarthyism in the US, and identified China as the number one threat to public
order. The Chinese Communist Party, he claimed in the media and in official
FBN reports, was over-seeing vast opium fields and had trained thousands of
agents to distribute heroin within the West. Per Anslinger, Chinese opium
production totaled “more than 4,000 tons ... a year,’ with the “profits from the
smuggling [being] used to finance the activities of the Communist Party and the
obtain strategic raw materials.’

Importantly, Anslinger did not have any agents located in Asia in the post-war
years, with FBN posting taking place at a fairly late date in 1962.

The claims made by Anslinger in the 1950s were sourced from intelligence
provided by the KMT itself and, in the early years, by the intelligence apparatus of
General Douglas MacArthur's military command in post-war Japan. Overseeing
this intelligence web was MacArthur's protégé, a fascist sympathizer named
General Charles Willoughby. Willoughby, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, would

later become a player in the so-called China Lobby, a domestic political pressure
network that supported the KMT and hardline Cold War politics.

It is doubtful that the misdirection being deployed by Anslinger, White, and
others in their milieu was for propagandistic purposes alone. Scott’s “Operation
X” thesis suggests a dual function. First, it bolstered Cold War propaganda efforts,
which roughly followed the same template as the “fifth column” propaganda of the
OSS during World War II. Second, it helped hide the roles of certain individuals,
organizations, and networks that worked in tandem with Western intelligence
services, militaries, governments, and businesses in the global drug trade. During
this period, investigations into organized crime in America were soft-pedaled, if
they took place at all, in part thanks to coercion and blackmail, particularly the
blackmailing of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. This also worked to obscure the role
of the KMT in the drug trade due to the historical unity of American organized
crime with Asian drug traffickers, forged in the inter-war period.

There is the stark possibility that this unity was maintained, well into the post-
war epoch, through the efforts of American intelligence services themselves. This
would result from the long-term effects of the OSS apparatus that had been set up
in the China-India-Burma theater during the war. That apparatus had been
concentrated around a powerful unit called Detachment 101 (which, incidentally,
had been set up with the aid of Garland Williams). Many of the most notorious
intelligence operatives and soldiers who dotted the landscape of the late 20"
century can trace their roots back to this OSS theater — and many of them will
appear throughout this book. Those who served there included E. Howard Hunt,
later a CIA coup-master who achieved infamy during Watergate. Another was
John Singlaub, a major player in the Iran-Contra affair. There was also Paul
Helliwell, soon to become one of the architects of convoluted shadow banking
strategies and a primary node between the worlds of intelligence and organized
crime.

In 1943, William R. Peers - who would later lead the CIAs first training
program — became the head of OSS Detachment 101 after his predecessor, Carl F.
Eifler, was injured. Peers subsequently became the head of all OSS operations in
the China-Burma-India theater, and personally oversaw commando operations
carried out by KMT troops against Chinese Communist forces. Peers later
reflected on his OSS years in an autobiography and, while discussing payment
issues needed to finance the OSS’ operations in Asia, made a startling disclosure:

Simply stated, paper currency and even silver were often useless, as there was nothing to buy
with money; opium, however, was the form of payment everybody used. Not to use it as a
means of barter would spell an end to our operations. Opium was available to agents who used it
for a number of reasons, from obtaining information to buying their own escape. Any
indignation felt was removed by the difficulty of the effort ahead. If opium could be useful in

achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.22

The OSS activities in Burma would lay the groundwork for the country to
subsequently act as an essential node in early Cold War activities against
Communist elements in Asia. Importantly, after Chinese Communists drove the
KMT out of the mainland and into Taiwan, Burma became one of their main
outposts. There, the CIA organized a secret army with prospective plans to stage
an invasion of China. “Although the KMT was to fail in its military operations,”
writes Alfred McCoy, “it succeeded in monopolizing and expanding ... the opium
trade”*% He continues:

The KMT shipped the opium harvests to northern Thailand, where they were sold to General
Phao Siyanan of the Thai police, a CIA client. The CIA had promoted the Phao-KMT
partnership to secure a rear area for the KMT, but this alliance soon became a critical factor in
the growth of Southeast Asia’s narcotics traffic. With CLA support, the KMT remained in Burma
until 1961, when a Burmese army offensive drove them into Laos and Thailand. By this time,
however, the Kuomintang had already used their control over the tribal populations to expand
Shan state opium production by almost 500 percent — from less than 80 tons after World War II

to an estimated 300-400 tons by 1962.22

The CIA’s Burma-Thailand support for the KMT was code-named “Operation
Paper”$ One of the architects of the operation was a close associate of Thailand’s
General Phao named Willis Bird — later nicknamed Mr. Opium. Bird, during
World War II, had served with OSS in the Burma-China-India theater. After the
end of the conflict, he remained in the region as a supplier to the Thai military and
police. Whether or not Bird was an on-the-books asset of the CIA isn’t clear,
though he certainly was a mid-dleman for moving supplies that had been obtained
via Agency financing.

These supplies arrived in Thailand by way of a company called South East Asia
Supply Corporation, most frequently referred to simply as SEA Supply.“ Willis
Bird acted as SEA Supply’s Bangkok office manager under the direction of
Sherman Joost — a veteran of OSS Detachment 101. SEA Supply was not set up in
Thailand, however. The business was instead registered in Miami, Florida by OSS-
veteran-turned lawyer and banker Paul Helliwell. At the same time that Helliwell

was handling the legal end of SEA Supply’s activities, he was also acting as consul
for the Thai government in the US. In this capacity, he was closely linked to
General Phao and the network of politicians who supported him.

SEA Supply worked closely with Civil Air Transport (CAT), the CIA’s first
proprietary airline. The roots of CAT were planted during the Second World War,
when Claire Chennault organized the Flying Tigers, a volunteer aviation unit set
up to provide support for the KMT in China in their fight against Japan. With
ranks drawn from the US military, the Flying Tigers trained at bases in Burma,
which acted as a logistics hub for their airlift. Chennault had long standing ties to
the KMT: since the late 1930s, Chennault had served as a military advisor to
Chiang Kai-Shek and his brother-in-law, the powerful Nationalist Chinese banker
and diplomat T.V. Soong.

Besides his links to the KMT leadership and to the US military, Chennault
maintained an impressive array of contacts. His lawyer was Thomas Corcoran, a
top advisor in President Roosevelt's New Deal brain trust. Corcoran was close to
Helliwell, and both worked together to promote Chennault’s aviation plans when
the war ended. Back in America, Chennault fell in with the so-called China Lobby,
the network of politicians, businessmen, and other players who lobbied for
support for the KMT as the only viable group who could oppose the Chinese
communists. He set up and managed an impressive airlift of “American relief
supplies in China” — with the supply flight contracts going to Chennault, of
course.°° Central to this effort was the 1946 creation of a new airline called Civil
Air Transport that Chennault had co-founded with Whiting Willauer.>4 Willauer
would go on to be US ambassador to Costa Rica and was also later involved in the
1954 CIA-led coup in Guatemala. When the KMT retreated to the island of
Formosa (now Taiwan), Chennault used CAT to run arms and medical supplies to
National Chinese fighters.

CAT was brought into the world of special operations thanks to the efforts of
Helliwell. He had brought Chennault and the aviation company to the attention of
Frank Wisner, then the head of a covert body called the Office of Policy
Coordination (OPC). Within several years, the OPC was incorporated into the
CIA, cementing in place a militarized command structure governing the dark arts
of the clandestine services. By 1950, CAT was a full-fledged CIA proprietary
airline, operating under the auspices of a holding company set up by the Agency

called Airdale Corp Later, Airdale Corp was renamed Pacific Corp, and CAT
would become Air America.

Air America was the CIA's premier airline, and remained active from the
1950s into the 1970s. It was finally dissolved in the wind-down of the Vietnam
War, though many of its assets were sold off and absorbed into a CIA-linked firm
called Evergreen International Aviation. Meanwhile, several Flying Tigers pilots
went on to create the air freighter firm Flying Tiger Line, a major commercial
cargo airline that also operated military contract services and engaged in covert
operations. Flying Tiger Line would later have a major presence at the
Rickenbacker airfield near Lockbourne, Ohio. CAT’s later incarnation, Southern
Air Transport, would relocate there in the early 1990s, a few years after Flying
Tiger Line was absorbed into Federal Express. The airline’s relocation was thanks,
in part, to Jeffrey Epstein and had chiefly relocated to manage cargo for Leslie
Wexner’s The Limited (see chapter 17).

Connections to organized crime appear in nearly every corner of this web.
Take, for instance, Margaret Chung, an “attending physician” for Chennault’s
Flying Tigers. A member of the Hip Sing tong, she made “frequent trips” to
Mexico City in the 1940s in the company of Virginia Hill — an inside player in
organized crime circles with close ties to the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer
Lanksy.°? During this period, Hill “became intimate with a number of Mexico's
top politicians, army officers, diplomats, and police officials,’ which likely
facilitated the activities of her friends in the underworld. Hill was also
particularly close to the Chicago Outfit during this time, the significance of which
will become clear shortly.

As mentioned above, Mexico had become an important base of operations for
the drug smuggling network of Costello and Carolla. Given their ties to Meyer
Lansky, it is certainly possible that Hill’s own appearance in Mexico was
connected to these earlier activities. Importantly, Mexico had also become a vital
transshipment point for the KMT’s own drug trafficking during this same period.
Does the presence of Margaret Chung alongside Hill, then, suggest that the
KMT’s drug operations in Mexico directly intersected with those of Lansky and
his milieu? Given the history of Lansky associates working with the KMT and the
Green Gang, it is certainly possible, if not likely.

The structure of this apparently intricate network can be developed further
when considering that Civil Air Transport, one of the successors to the Flying

Tigers, was, by 1960, flying in and out of Laotian territory controlled by the
Hmong tribesmen. The tribesmen were a major supplier of opium destined for
refinement into heroin (the CIA’s covert support for the Hmong is discussed in
Chapter 5). Airstrips for CAT’s flights were built by Bird and Sons, a “private
engineering firm” controlled by “the CAT representative in Bangkok,’ William H.
Bird.“ Bird was the cousin of Willis Bird of the OSS and of Helliwell’s SEA
Supply.

There was also the case of Helliwell himself. By this point, he had become a
prominent player in Republican politics. He was, for example, a delegate for
Dwight Eisenhower as he strove to clinch the Republican Party presidential
nomination. Helliwell had also been a leader in the Florida chapter of Citizens for
Eisenhower. That chapter was subsequently accused of “being taken over by
professionals who refuse[d] to work with the regular GOP leaders and who are
accountable to no one for the finances they collect.”°2 Members of this cadre of
operators aside from Helliwell included Curt Landon and James Guilmartin.
Together, these three men were tightly-connected co-conspirators amassing
unaccountable power:

Landon is a substantial client of Helliwell’s law firm; Guilmartin is a partner of Helliwell’s and
Guilmartin is married to Landon’s daughter. We find these men closely allied by business and
marriage who, if their plan succeeds, will find themselves in a position of enormous power in

Florida and responsible to no recognized Republican authority.

While Helliwell was making waves in the world of politics and in the world of
covert operations, he was also making a foray into the world of Florida insurance.
He was the consul for, and later secretary, then chairman, of American Bankers
Life Assurance, located in Miami. Importantly, Helliwell utilized the offices of
American Bankers Life as the hub for many of his activities. The Florida Thai
consulate, for instance, was located at the same address as the insurance company
- as was SEA Supply.

In addition to this important CIA linkage, American Bankers Life also shared
important connections — one of which was Helliwell himself - with Miami
National Bank. Founded with a loan from the Teamster pension fund, Miami
National “was identified in 1969 as having served between 1963 and 1967 as a
conduit through which ‘hot’ syndicate money was exported by Meyer Lansky’s
couriers and ‘laundered’ through the inter-locking Exchange and Investment Bank

in Geneva.” The importance of Lansky’s Geneva bank will be discussed in
Chapter 3.

Helliwell’s ventures, and specifically his banking endeavors, were probably
related to the flow of heroin that originated as KMT opium and then passed
through the hands of American organized crime figures. In his book Hot Money
and the Politics of Debt, offshore banking expert R.T. Naylor writes that “South
Florida is ... a major refuge for Latin American flight money, which pours into the
Florida banking system and local real estate. The flight capital-into-real estate
business is an old one. In the 1950s and 1960s, Kuomintang money from Thailand
and Burma came via Hong Kong to be washed in Lansky-related property

firms.”&

THE SUPERMOB

he global drug trade is a massive business, and the offshore banking system
that enables it is even bigger. Although most imagine drug networks, their
controllers and their users as existing on the fringes of society, in reality, the
massive amounts of capital that result from the production and distribution of
illicit drugs occupy a central place with-in the global economic system. Consider a
statement made in 2009 by Antonio Maria Costa, who was then the head of the
UN Office on Drugs and Crime. According to Costa, proceeds from the drug
trade were an important source of liquidity for cash-starved banks at the height of
the 2008 economic crisis. The amounts absorbed by the banking system were
enough to prevent some banks from collapsing: “Inter-bank loans were funded by
money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There
were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”®°
In 2000, Le Monde Diplomatique suggested that the global drug trade was a
billion dollar a year business - an incredibly low estimate. Seventeen years later,
the Global Financial Integrity Project estimated that worldwide drug trafficking
revenue stood somewhere between $426 to $652 billion annually. In the same
report, the overall revenue of illicit activities was posited to be $2.2 trillion. The
UN Office on Drugs and Crime, meanwhile, estimated that money laundering
activities - encompassing the washing of illicit drug revenue and more — make up
anywhere from 2 to 5% of global GDP, at around $800 billion to $2 trillion.
This, again, is almost certainly a conservative estimate. In 2012, $21-$32 trillion

was estimated to be sloshing through the offshore banking system. This number
would have only increased in the wake of the earlier 2008 financial crisis.

When such immense sums of money are being generated, it isn’t left to idle in
bank accounts in the Caymans, Bermuda, the City of London, or wherever. The
end destination of a money washing process is to transform dirty money into
seemingly-clean investment capital. Journalist Michael Ruppert, in his book
Crossing the Rubicon, cites cases where companies have tapped illicit money flows
in order to borrow money at a lower interest rate than they would receive from
major banking institutions.“2 The conversion of dirty or hot money into “credit
capital” (capital that begins as a line of credit issued by a lending institution) is
made easier by bank secrecy laws in tax havens, which makes it possible for
legitimate and illegitimate pools of capital to intermingle freely.

Catherine Austin Fitts and Chris Sanders have gone even further by
suggesting that there is a positive correlation between the upwards trajectory of
stock market performance and the consistent ballooning of the drug trade. While
there are a number of factors that impact stock market performance — such as easy
money injected into the economy by the central banks of various countries — Fitts
and Sanders write that:

It may seem strange to think of a positive correlation between narcotics trafficking and the stock
market, but consider ... the proceeds of crime need to find a way into legitimate, that is, legal,
channels or they are worthless to the holders. If one further imagines that the banking system
earns a fee of one per cent for handling this flow (rather low considering that money laundering
is a seller's market) then the profits for banks from this activity are of the order of $5 to $10
billion. Applying Citigroup's current stock market multiple of 15 or so to this yields a market
capitalisation of anywhere from $65 to $115 billion. One can thus readily see the importance of

the illegal drug trade to the financial services industry.

Another tactic for washing money is the “capital-into-real estate” operations
that Naylor referred to in relation to KMT drug money flows in Florida. Indeed, it
seems that the explosive growth of the world economy in the decades following
World War II opened up countless investment opportunities where the funds
from drugs and other sources of capital for organized crime would be socked
away. It was this period, after all, that saw the great ballooning of real estate
markets and the high tech industry, along with the modern tourism industry that
spawned everything from destination resorts in “exotic” locales to the sparkling
lights of Las Vegas casinos.

In his book Power Shift, Kirkpatrick Sale argues that the post-war era was
characterized by a rising “Southern Rim” that came to confront the traditional seat
of American economic and political power in the north-east. The Southern Rim
was made of the southern states, portions of the Midwest and the Sunbelt — a large
expanse that stretched from Florida to California. The Rim’s ascendancy, he
argues, was connected to the opening up of vast real estate opportunities, related
in part to tourism and retirement, to the oil and gas industries, and to the delirious
growth of defense-related industries under the new Cold War paradigm.

Sale suggests that organized crime, so often associated with the American
northeast, found a remarkable range of new opportunities in the Southern Rim,
thus propelling these networks to previously inconceivable heights of power and
influence. The blossoming trade of opium and heroin, clearly spurred and
protected by the CIA, fit snuggly into these series of developments. Sale writes
that:

Smuggling - especially of heroin, in which the trade grew steadily more lucrative after the
opening up of Asia's golden triangle in 1948 — tilted to the South, taking advantage of the
enormous Rim coastline and the porous Mexican border, along which whole networks of “Latin
connections” and “Mexican connections” were developed.... And everywhere in the booming
Rim, millions of dollars were placed in legitimate investments, chiefly in those high-risk
operations where venture capital is hard to come by - oil exploration, for example, and land
speculation — and in those large-scale businesses where sizable amounts of capital are necessary
— corporate farming, for example, technological manufacturing, and, above all, real estate

development.22

The observations and arguments made by Kirkpatrick Sale, Michael Ruppert,
and Catherine Austin Fitts neatly dovetail with the complicated yet organized
history detailed by Gus Russo in his book Supermob. The term “Supermob,” per
Russo, refers to a close-knit circle of Jewish and Italian mobsters and businessmen
who arose in the corruption-ridden corridors of Chicago and who then installed
themselves in California and elsewhere. What makes the “Supermob” unique is
that it was particularly stark and fairly unmasked example of how criminal
networks, political power, and “legitimate” commercial activity mixed together in
the period of explosive economic and cultural growth in the wake of World War
II.

A key player in this group was Jake Avery, who started off as a political fixer in
Chicago’s 24‘ Ward. He acted as a precinct captain, and managed to swing the
dominant political orientation of the ward from the Republican to the Democratic

Party. He was later praised by Franklin D. Roosevelt for his efforts to make his
district “the best Democratic ward in the country.’ By 1928, Avery was the ward
chairman — and a budding associate of organized crime. He forged an alliance with
the gangster Al Capone, and the two worked together to elevate Anton Cermak to
the mayor's office.

On the business side of things, one of Avery's closest associates was Henry
Crown, who later became a major figure in the Hilton hotel company, the
dominant controlling interest in the major defense contractor General Dynamics,
and the owner of the Empire State Building. He subsequently sold the iconic
building to Lawrence Wien, a New York City lawyer and real estate developer who
was helping manage the assets of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, which was
controlled by mobster Moe Dalitz and, as will be noted in Chapter 4, tied up with
the affairs of the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn.

Crown was also in business with David G. Baird, who ran a trio of foundations
closely tied closely to organized crime and that moved CIA money. David Baird
and his foundations will also be discussed in Chapter 4. Crown's son, Lester,
would later join the “Mega Group,” which was co-founded by Leslie Wexner and
Charles Bronfman in 1991 and is discussed in detail in Chapter 14.

Henry Crown's business empire first began with his company Material
Services Corporation, a supplier of concrete and other materials for construction
companies. During World War II, Crown took leave from Material Service to
serve in the Army Corp of Engineers. During this same period, the company
benefited greatly from Crown’ relationship with Jake Avery. As Russo writes,
Avery, who had also joined the armed services, “managed to become, with no
small thanks to friends in the Roosevelt administration, the overseer of countless
international post exchange (PX) facilities on military bases. Soon, the military
was supplying these PXs with goods purchased from buddy Col. Crown's Material
Service Corporation.”

In 1959, Material Services Corporation merged with General Dynamics,
which — at the time — was a producer of bomber aircraft, ballistic missile systems
and other cutting-edge technologies for the American military. Crown received
20% equity in the company, making him the controlling stakeholder, and his right-
hand man, Patrick Hoy, was installed as vice president of the corporation. Hoy
had earlier been president of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, a popular watering

hole for various denizens of the city’s organized crime community.“ Since

General Dynamics’ board was populated by a cross-section of individuals tied to
the Cold War military and intelligence structures, this chain of ownership and
associates is a surprisingly straightforward instance of mutual collusion between
these spheres and the criminal underworld. In 1966, after leaving General
Dynamics, Hoy became vice chairman of the Penn-Dixie Cement Company - the
CEO of which, Jerome Castle, “was an admitted ‘old friend’ of New York crime
boss Frank Costello.”

Avery, Crown, and Hoy were all close to an important Chicago lawyer named
Sidney Korshak. The Korshak family had grown up with the Averys, and just like
Jake Avery, Sidney Korshak forged an early working relationship with Al Capone.
Even before he was officially an attorney, Korshak’s side gig, while he was in law
school, had been to act as an advisor to the infamous gangster. His subsequent law
partner, Edward King, was the “lawyer for Capone's heir Frank Nitti,’ before
setting off for “greener pastures in New York,” where he worked for Meyer Lansky
himself.“ Lansky and Korshak also did business together, as partners in the
Acapulco Towers Hotel. Notably, the magazine New West stated in 1976 that
Korshak was the “logical successor to Meyer Lansky.”

Like Crown’s business associate Lawrence Wein, Korshak had ties to mobster
Moe Dalitz’s circles. According to Russo, Korshak lent his considerable legal
talents to helping arrange frontmen for organized crime interests in Las Vegas
hotels and casinos. “|T ]he hoods,” he writes, needed owners of record whose IRS
statements reflected legitimate wealth. The obvious first choice was ... Moe
Dalitz.’2 Dalitz, his criminal background, and his webs of associations will be
discussed mainly in Chapter 4.

Another associate of the “Supermob” was Julius Caesar Stein, an
“ophthalmologist and musician” that abandoned “his medical career to book
dance bands and singers into speakeasies and nightclubs on Chicago's South
Side.”®° In 1924, he founded the Music Corporation of America (MCA) as an
umbrella company for his booking efforts; reportedly, Al Capone owned a secret
piece of the company. While this cannot be confirmed, it is true that Capone and
Stein had a cozy relationship, with the gangster ensuring that Chicago's bars, clubs,
and music halls directed their business towards Stein and MCA.%#

In 1936, Stein brought a man into the MCA fold who would go on to
fundamentally shape the character and direction of the American entertainment
industry forever — Lew Wasserman. Unsurprisingly, Wasserman already boasted a

background in mob circles: he had been the publicist for Cleveland, Ohio's
Mayfair Casino, which was controlled by Moe Dalitz’s network. Dalitz and
Wasserman maintained life-long ties - Wasserman would even marry Edith
Beckerman, the daughter of Dalitz’s lawyer, Henry Beckerman.®2 Wasserman
knew Beckerman from his days at the Mayfair Casino: Beckerman’s name was
listed on the club’s liquor license. Wasserman’s and MCA’s connections to
organized crime are discussed in greater detail in chapters 9 and 10.

Soon, the Chicago mob began its slow creep into Los Angeles, moving into
Hollywood and adjacent industries. The man who started off their advance was
Johnny Roselli, who would later land in Las Vegas as the Chicago mob’s frontman
in the casino business. He was placed in charge of skimming operations, which, as
will be discussed in Chapter 3, moved money into offshore banks in the
Caribbean that were themselves controlled by representatives of Meyer Lansky.
Perhaps it was his intimate familiarity with this world that helped Roselli become
the CIA's mafiosi of choice when it came to recruiting organized crime figures for
its covert assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Through the operations that took shape in California, massive amounts of
illicit money began to be dumped into “above-board” industries. Real estate was a
particularly hot commodity, and the architect of many of the investments made by
the “Supermob” was a protégé of Avery and Korshak named Paul Ziffren. Ziffren’s
granddaughter would later marry Lew Wasserman’s grandson, later bringing these
families even closer together. Ziffren acted as the LA representative of Hilton
Hotel interests, and he was the source of the seed capital that launched Store
Properties Inc., a real estate holding company whose ostensible owner was a man
named Sam Genis. Genis was most likely a conduit for enabling the flow of
organized crime money into real estate. Per Russo, Genis was:

...a known associate of mob bosses Longy Zwillman, Doc Stacher, Frank Costello, Joey Adonis,
and Meyer Lansky. Genis’ criminal record showed that he had been arrested for bad checks in
Florida, embezzlement in New York, and mail fraud and securities law violations in Georgia...
By 1957, Store Properties had bought thousands of acres of land in over three hundred
transactions worth $20 million in Los Angeles alone. When Store’s other California purchases
are factored in (in San Bernardino, Fresno, Oakland, and San Francisco), the estimate
approaches $100 million. Then there were the additional investments in such states as Arizona,

Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida, Illinois, and New York 84

Genis, interestingly, was the member of an organized circle of businessmen
who helped provide the start-up capital for the Committee on the Present Danger

(CPD), an early Cold War-pressure group set up to build public support for the
militarization plan that had been drawn up by NSC 68. NSC 68 was a National
Security Council policy paper that called for the remarkable expansion of the US’
military budget. Naturally, the CPD counted among its members many
representatives of defense contracting companies, a field that, as noted above with
the case of Crown, Hoy, and General Dynamics, was becoming increasingly
infiltrated by elements of organized crime.

The organizers behind this California group (CPD) were the movie producer
Samuel Goldwyn and industrialist Floyd Odlum. Odlum, a shadowy figure who is
now largely forgotten, was the man behind the towering Atlas Corporation,
through which he invested heavily into a vast array of aviation companies, film
studios, real estate, and natural resources. Atlas Corporation would later gain
lucrative government contracts; in particular for its interests in uranium mining
inside the United States and abroad. Odlum’s interests were certainly diverse:
through Atlas, his money seeped into Hilton hotels, into the United Fruit
Company, and into Pan Am. Atlas also controlled Convair, the aircraft
manufacturer and defense contractor, which it sold to General Dynamics in 1953.
As part of the deal, Atlas received large amounts of General Dynamic stock and a
representative on the company’s board. Odlum and Harry Crown, in other words,
were directly affiliated.

Other associates of the California group backing the formation of the CPD
were a number of film industry figures, including future president Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was a MCA man through and through, having been represented by the
company when it bought out the agency that had previously represented him in
1940. “Based on the success of King’s Row in 1942,’ wrote Dan Moldea in his
book on MCA, Dark Victory, “[Lew] Wasserman renegotiated Reagan’s contract
with Warner Brothers, obtaining a deal that paid Reagan $3,500 a week for seven
years. The deal gave Reagan the distinction of being Wasserman’s first ‘million-
dollar client? 86

As will be noted again in Chapter 10, the rise of Reagan to the heights of
political power in the United States was facilitated in large part by Wasserman and
MCA. At the same time, Reagan was vital to the survival and success of MCA in
Hollywood. At the behest of Wasserman, Reagan ran for, and won, the presidency
of the powerful Screen Actors Guild (SAG). At the time, Reagan was also acting
as an FBI informant, reporting to the bureau on leftists in Hollywood. Once in

charge of the SAG, Reagan began to change the rules to benefit his benefactors.
SAG had previously restricted companies like MCA - that is, talent agencies —
from becoming producers. However, in 1952, Reagan granted the company a
special waiver. MCA thus gained “an insurmountable edge over competing
agencies in Hollywood” and “began to exponentially increase its hold over the
entertainment industry” 87

Later, when Reagan secured the governorship of California in 1966, MCA‘s
hidden hand was again lurking in the background. The co-chairman of his
campaign was Taft Schreiber, the long-running vice president of MCA, while the
company’s founder Jules Stein went to work arranging funding. According to
Moldea, a “standing joke in Hollywood was that ‘MCA even had its own
governor”’88 MCA had actually hedged its bets in that election. Running against
Reagan was the incumbent Pat Brown, who was being backed by Wasserman and
Korshak. Henry Denker, a playwright and producer with numerous Hollywood
connections, stated that:

MCA was divided into two groups. There was a Democratic group and a Republican group.
They always wanted to have a hand in the White House, no matter which party was there. When
Reagan was doing the General Electric show, somebody came up with the idea that he would
promote GE to the plants, make visits. These appearances were very successful. They saw how
the workers loved him, and somebody at MCA said, “Hey, he could be governor of the state. In

show business you go with what’s working - that’s an old maxim.22

After being defeated by Reagan, Pat Brown took a directorship at Investors
Overseas Services (IOS), an international mutual fund with connections to Meyer
Lansky. He had been brought to the fund by James Roosevelt, one of the sons of
former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. James, it seems, had organized crimes ties
of his own, as he had done business with Store Properties, the mob-controlled real
estate company that had been set up by Ziffren and Genis. Also partnered
alongside Roosevelt in Store Properties was James Swig, who would serve earlier
as “Pat Brown’s statewide finance chairman in his successful California
gubernatorial campaign”?

The Roosevelt boys seemed to have a penchant for fostering ties to the
underworld. James’ brother, John Roosevelt, had arranged for Jimmy Hoffa to get
a job at Bache & Company, a New York City securities and stock brokerage that
“handled about 25 percent of the [Teamster Pension’s] funds $160 million dollar
investments.’2+ The president of Bache & Co., incidentally, was Frank T. Ryan, a

veteran of the OSS, who was partnered with the spymaster William Donovan and
other veterans of US and British wartime intelligence in the World Commerce
Corporation (WCC). WCC itself was capitalized by a handful of firms, including
Bache & Co. itself and Floyd Odlum’s Atlas Corporation, which was represented
on the WCC board by Odlum’s brother-in-law, L. Boyd Hatch.

With this set of ties, the specter of intelligence connections begins to emerge
once again. It is no surprise, then, that there is a direct line running from the
Chicago-Los Angeles “Supermob’” to the networks that were simultaneously being
organized by Paul Helliwell.

KINGS OF THE CASTLE

© the forty-fifth page of the most-well known of Jeffrey Epstein’s two black

contact books are the names and numbers of two individuals from the same
prominent Chicago family: Nicholas and Thomas Pritzker. Epstein listed two
addresses, five phone numbers and one email address for Nicholas; for Thomas,
he had two addresses, one email, and twelve phone numbers ranging from his
main office number to his farm to his emergency contact line. Under Nicholas
Pritzker, Epstein placed the name “Hyatt Development Corp” — the Hyatt hotel
company had been taken over by the Pritzker family late in the 1950s — while
under Thomas he cryptically noted “Numero Uno.”

The Pritzkers have long been a potent force in local, state and national politics.
Penny Pritzker, a cousin to Thomas (and a board member of the Council on
Foreign Relations), had met Barack Obama in the early 1990s, and the future
president's political career has long relied on lucrative donations made by her and
her family. Obama repaid his debt by making Penny Pritzker a member of the
President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. During Obama's second term,
Penny was nominated — and confirmed - as his Secretary of Commerce.

Penny's brother J.B. Pritzker, meanwhile, served as the co-chair of Hillary
Clinton’s 2008 campaign before working to broker an agreement between Clinton
and Obama. In 2019, he was elected Governor of Illinois. The third sibling,
Anthony Pritzker, has avoided taking public office, but maintains a post on the
advisory board of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at the RAND Corporation.

Travel up the family tree and one begins to find that the Pritzker family’s
wealth and influence might have originated in darker corners. Take Abram

Nicholas Pritzker, grandfather to Nicholas, Thomas, Penny, J.B. and Anthony. One
of three sons of Nicholas J. Pritzker, Abram had worked with his brothers at the
family law firm, Pritzker & Pritzker, where he specialized in business law. In the
1930s, he decided to dip into the world of business himself, and he and his
brother Jack invested in a string of companies across Chicago. One of these was
Hyatt, which would help the family secure lasting influence. As was the case with
Henry Crown, the Pritzkers had to deal with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
Union - where Sidney Korshak was the labor negotiator.
Then, there was the case of the Frontier Finance. As Gus Russo writes:

Jack Clarke, a renowned Chicago private investigator, recently recalled what he heard on the
streets: “Frontier Finance was used and owned by the Pritzkers as a holding company and is
believed to be the secret to the origins of the family’s involvement with criminals. Pritzker lent
to immigrants ‘five for seven, or five dollars lent against seven dollars repayment with interest. It
was started on the West Side and the Pritzkers let the mob run it for them. This company office
was where the mob held their meetings.” Frontier Finance was a state-licensed loan company,
with a number of legit investors, such as the postmaster of Chicago, a former chairman of the
Cook County Republican Party, and a retired Chicago police captain. But curiously, the
president of the firm was Frank Buccieri, brother of the notorious Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, one of

the Outfit’s top gambling bosses and a dreaded “juice” collector.22

Another Abram Pritzker venture was the Franklin Investment Company,
which later went on to dominate the hotel business in Columbus, Ohio. It had
been set up with the aid of Paul Ziffren, who acted as a partner in the venture.
Joining them was a friend of Abram named Arthur Greene. Described by the
Chicago Crime Commission as the “brains of all the Chicago rackets,’ Greene — a
close associate of the aforementioned James Roosevelt — was reported to have
facilitated investments on behalf of Meyer Lansky. Additionally, “Greene
somehow figured in the California expansion of Jules Steins MCA, through a
relative named Edwin Greene” — a vice president at MCA.

The Pritzker family employed Burton Kanter to serve as the tax attorney for
their burgeoning empire, and Kanter gained a spot on the Hyatt board. Kanter
would, in time, boast connections to powerful operatives from international
criminal networks — not to mention the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Yet, earlier on,
Kanter received massive kickbacks from Abram Pritzker after Kanter arranged for
the family to take over a San Francisco hotel built by Prudential Financial (Kanter,
in characteristic fashion, opted not to pay any taxes on his gains).2° As part of the
deal, Kanter had arranged for secret payments to be made to Prudential

executives. What’s remarkable about this story is that it took several decades to
unravel: Kanter and Pritzker had put this scheme in motion in the 1970s, but it
was not revealed until 2007.

Kanter was deeply connected to the world of mob-linked business. In 1968,
for example, he was listed as the agent for the La Costa Club near San Diego. La
Costa, for all intents and purposes, was built for and by organized crime figures.
Gene Ayres and Jeff Morgan, writing in the Oakland Tribune, noted that “La
Costa's original developers include Allard Roen, who was convicted in 1962 on
stock fraud charges, and Morris Barney ‘Moe’ Dalitz, who, with Roen, was part of
the old-time Cleveland gambling crowd”

Ayres and Morgan then added that “Among La Costa's visitors have been
Chicago ‘politicians’ Marshall Korshak [brother of Sidney Korshak] and Jake
Avery; St. Louis attorney Morris Shenker, a legal defender of James Hoffa.... One
man who reportedly spends more time at La Costa than anyone else is Allen
Dorfman, the Chicago insurance magnate who wields tremendous influence over
the Teamsters Central State Pension Fund”? La Costa itself managed to tap into
$62 million in Teamster pension fund loans.? Importantly, a close associate of
Kanter named Stanford Clinton — himself a partner at the Pritzker & Pritzker law
firm and Hyatt board member — was a trustee for the fand.”

Other Kanter ventures were located far from the windswept cityscapes of
Chicago and the sunny, beach-adjacent plains of Southern California. He was also
connected to a most curious bank located in the Bahamas: Castle Bank and Trust.
When the IRS came knocking on Castle’s door, Kanter told them he was merely a
tax consultant to the bank. That was a lie — he was one half of the bank’s top
management, and he was shepherding money from his various clients into its
coffers. The Pritzker family itself would later be revealed to be the bank’s largest
depositors, while a number of people tied closely to them maintained accounts
there as well. Stanford Clinton held money in Castle, as did the actor Tony Curtis,
a close friend of Sidney Korshak.+® Playboy’s Hugh Hefner was there as well; he
intriguingly “planned to join with a Pritzker company in an Atlantic City casino
venture.”101

Castle maintained accounts for the usual crew of organized crime suspects.
Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker and Lou Rothkopf, as well as major parts of the
Cleveland mob scene that surrounded Moe Dalitz, held money in Castle.

However, accounts vary as to whether or not Dalitz himself had money there12

Kleinman, whose attorney was Kanter, was reportedly a secret co-owner in the
bank. Either way, his accounts in Castle reflected his hidden interest in a company
called Karat Inc., which operated the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. The Stardust
itself was owned by Lodestar Inc., a company controlled by Dalitz.

Authorities had been put on the trail of Castle Bank in 1971 after a man
named Allan George Palmer and several of his associates were busted flying
marijuana from Florida to Oakland, California. Palmer was subsequently revealed
to have been “a major producer of LSD, mescaline, and THC” in the San
Francisco Bay area since around 1968.1% Palmer fell under the scrutiny of the San
Francisco IRS office, which was then leading a program against drug money
networks. That office soon discovered that the dealer had used the then-unknown
Castle Bank, whose services he accessed via American National Banker & Trust
Company in Chicago. Palmer, it seems, had been brought to Castle via Roger S.
Baskes, Kanter’s brother-in-law and a partner in his law firm.

This was not the only LSD-related banking taking place at Castle. Accounts
were also maintained by William Mellon Hitchcock, a scion of the Mellon family,
who will appear again in connection with the UK’s Profumo Affair in Chapter 4.
Hitchcock was one of the financial backers of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,
the so-called “hippie mafia” that produced and distributed psychedelics on an
international scale.1% Given that they were based in Orange County, California, it
is possible that Palmer's ring was part of their operation — though that cannot be
confirmed at this time.

The San Francisco IRS requested aid from the IRS intelligence apparatus in
Chicago, which promptly tracked down Castle’s information. They found a card
that listed the bank’s principals, several of whom were revealed to have been
fictitious characters. At the top of the list was Kanter and his partner, the other
half of Castle’s management: Paul Helliwell. Alan Block writes that “Kanter and
Helliwell had known each other since the late 1950s, having met while working on
a deal between a Kanter client and one of Helliwell’s’ 12

Castle Bank was a melding of worlds. On the one hand, there was Kanter’s
specialty in offshore trusts and his connections to both the city’s political power
centers and the sprawl of its “supermob”. On the other hand, there was Helliwell —
the Republican Party insider, intelligence veteran (and continued intelligence
asset), and an offshore specialist in his own right with intimate connections to the
blossoming heroin traffic coming out from Southeast Asia. Together, they

organized a complicated money laundering operation that silently moved the
funds of powerful gangsters, politicians, businessmen, and intelligence services
around the globe.

When Castle was first established, it was a just a paper company — a company
that existed only as a legal entity, with no officers, infrastructure or business
activity to speak of. It sat for three years from when it was registered in 1964 until
1967, when it was finally activated. A physical headquarters was established in
Nassau and a law firm — that of a British expat living in Argentina named Anthony
James Tullis Gooding - was retained. Shortly thereafter, the number of accounts
at the bank began to balloon. Banking relations were then established with banks
in the United States; namely, Bank of Perrine and Bank of Cutler-Ridge.

Bank of Perrine and Bank of Cutler-Ridge were small, Florida-based
institutions that were intimately interconnected. They shared relationships not
only with Castle Bank, but with one another as well. Both had the same chairman
— Paul Helliwell - and they were also owned by the same sets of holding
companies, HMT Corporation and later Florida Shares, Inc. The shares of these
companies were owned by Helliwell and his circle of associates, with one being a
mysterious figure by the name of E.P. Barry. Helliwell and Barry had known each
other since their days together in the OSS, though the details of the particulars of
their relationship are murky. Barry had spent time in the Middle East during his
clandestine service, but, by the end of the war, he was serving as the head of OSS’
X-2 Vienna branch (i.e. the OSS counterintelligence division) 1°

Following the war, Barry remained in Europe and became immersed in the
world of Zurich banking. Through Barry and his connection to Helliwell and
HMT/Florida Shares, a number of connections can be found. As will be
discussed in Chapter 3, Barry, at the same time that he was involved with these
Florida banks, could also be found at the ground floor of Inter Maritime Bank,
which was controlled by a close friend of future CIA director William J. Casey and
a businessman-underworld operator named Bruce Rappaport (Casey, also an OSS
veteran, was reportedly close to Barry as well).

Another bank, discussed in later chapters, is the Bank of World Commerce, a
Lansky-controlled bank that helped move casino skim and other “hot money”
funds abroad. According to Tom Farer, Bank of Perrine had banking relations with
the Bank of World Commerce in addition to Castle Bank and Trust. What was

taking shape, in other words, appears to have been an elaborate “daisy chain” of
offshore banks.

One of the early ventures that Castle engaged in was a convoluted land fraud
that netted millions and intimately involved Kanter. The fraud was carried out
under the auspices of a company called International Computerized Land
Research (ICLR). Gooding, the British-Argentine attorney who represented
Castle, registered the company, and Kanter appears to have kept the company
afloat financially, in addition to it using the services of Castle Bank. Thanks to the
Bahamas’ bank secrecy structures, Kanter was able to obscure his position as
hidden partner in ICLR.

ICLR was run by James McGowan and James Farrara, the latter of whom was
a “fairly sleazy operator with a criminal record stretching back to 1926 when he
was fined for running a whorehouse. He spent some time in prison in the 1930s
and 1940s for violations of the Mann Act, having to do with transporting women
across state lines for immoral purposes” 128 ICLR was just one, albeit the largest
and most complex, in a string of companies this pair had formed in order to hawk
low-value California land at high price to unsuspecting investors in Europe and
Asia. “The promotional material,” reads one press report, “lists Nassau, Okinawa,
Hong Kong, Zurich, and Munich as sites of real estate agencies representing
ICLR? =

Like Kanters elaborate kickback schemes on behalf of the Pritzkers,
authorities took decades to untangle the web left by ICLR. When indictments
were finally brought against McGowan and Farrara in 1982, the Los Angeles Times
reported that the duo stood accused of running a “far-flung land sales empire” that
defrauded “buyers of more than $15 million over a 17-year period. “Ihe $15
million is a very conservative number; said Assistant U.S. [Attorney] Gary
Feess”H? Given that Kanter and his associates effectively structured ICLR,
provided it with financing, took a financial stake in the company, and provided it
with banking services, there are obvious questions as to the ultimate purpose —
and destination — of this pilfered money.

Castle Bank wasn't only a repository and conduit for money belonging to tax-
evading billionaires, shady businessmen, drug dealers and land fraudsters. It seems
some of their other clients wielded a different kind of power that helped grant the
bank its knack for evading official inquiry. First, a sweeping IRS probe into Castle
that had unearthed an expansive network dedicated to tax evasion was shut down.

In addition, the list of names of Castle clients investigators had obtained was
declared to have been found through illegal means. Then, a Department of Justice
probe into the bank was dropped in 1977. Three years later, in 1980, the real
circumstances of this obstruction were revealed:

It now appears that pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency, rather than any legal
problem, was what caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax
evasion case of all time. Moreover, the supposed legal obstacle to using the Castle Bank
Depositors’ list was questionable at best - the government already had in its possession the
same list, legally obtained - What caused the Justice Department to back off seems to have been

the CIA's argument that pursuit of the Castle Bank would endanger “national security” H4

According to an unnamed Federal source, Castle Bank was “one of the CIA's
finance channels for operations against Cuba.” Helliwell —- and presumably Castle
— was purportedly involved with the Agency in “financing a series of covert forays
between 1964 and 1975 against Cuba by CIA operatives working from Andros
Island,” one of the many islands located in the Bahamas not too far from Florida's
southernmost coastline. Declassified CIA files show that, going back to the pre-
Bay of Pigs invasion era, Andros was used as a staging ground for the CIA’s cadres
of Cuban exiles that the Agency had armed and trained to fight against Castro.
Later, in the 1980s, Andros would serve as one of the transshipment points for
Colombian cocaine flowing into the United States by way of Nicaragua. Involved
in this particular channel was a figure who will be addressed at length in future

chapters, Robert Vesco. H2

Endnotes

nm Bh WwW

Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade: Afghanistan,
Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia, Rev. ed (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books: Distributed
by Independent Publishers Group, 2003), 31.

The role of Haffendon is discussed at length in Rodney Campbell, The Luciano Project: The
Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, chap. 1.

Campbell, The Luciano Project, 76.

McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 30.

Priscilla M. Roberts in “The American ‘Eastern Establishment’: A Challenge for Historians”
describes the concept as encompassing “A body of individuals committed to what are often
loosely term ‘internationalist’ policies, men drawn from the leading financial and business
institutions, law firms, lvy League universities, major philanthropic foundations, and
communications media of the East Coast, who take a particular interest in and have a
substantial impact upon the direction of twentieth century foreign affairs.’ From the SHAFR
Newsletter, XIV, December 1983, 9.

Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy
(Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 23-24.

Donald Janson, “Resorts Head Tells of Dropping Partner,’ New York Times, January 17, 1979,
partner.html.

Joan Cook, “James M. Crosby, 58, Founder of Hotel and Casino Concern,’ New York Times,
founder-of-hotel-and-casino-concern.html.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris write that the Mary Carter Paint Company “was widely
considered to be a CIA front that laundered money to the Cuban exile army in the early
1960s.” Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas
and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000, 1st ed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 284,
https://archive.org/details/moneypowermakingOOdent.

John C. Williams, “Covert Connections: the FBN, the OSS, and the CIA,’ The Historian, Vol. 53,
No. 4, Summer, 1991, 668.

Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency
(Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press, 2005), 80.

Smith, OSS, 14.

David Rockefeller’s wartime intelligence activities is discussed in David Rockefeller, Memoirs
(New York: Random House, 2003).

Richard B. Spence, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, 1905-1925, ePub (Oregon: Trine Day
LLC, 2017), 507-08. Spence notes that when Donovan returned to New York City in October
1920, another passenger on the same ship was William Wiseman, the British soymaster who
maintained a post in New York City during World War I (sort of a model for the later activities
of William Stephenson and the British Security Coordination during World War Il). In 1920,
Wiseman went to work for Kuhn Loeb, and two years later became head of the New York &

21
22
23
24

25
26

27
28

29

30
31
32
33

34
35

36

37

38
39
40

Foreign Development Corporation - a “spin-off” of Kuhn Loeb set up to “capitalize on
Eastern European opportunities.”

Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44,
ePub (Washington [D.C.]: Brassey’s, 1998), 44.

Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York, N.Y.: Norton, 2001), 265-66.
Smith, OSS, 29.

Mahl, Desperate Deception, 65.

David Ignatius, “How Churchill's Agents Secretly Manipulated the U.S. Before Pearl Harbor,’
Washington Post, September 17, 1989,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/09/17/how-churchills-agents-
secretly-manipulated-the-us-before-pear|-harbor/0881f7a8-7c9d-49d0-8338-
eac3be333134/

Mahl, Desperate Deception, 64.

Mahl, Desperate Deception, 96

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996), 174.
John H Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New
York: New American Library, 1989), 50.

Davis, Mafia Kingfish, 59.

For an excellent overview of this history, see Shiu Hing Lo, The Politics of Controlling
Organized Crime in Greater China, 2016.

Lo, Controlling Organized Crime, 12.

The most in-depth treatment of the KMT’s opium monopoly efforts is Jonathan Marshall,
“Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945,” Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars, No. 8, Vol. 3, 1976.

On the Rockefeller Foundation and the KMT, see Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of
Gangsterism,’ 21. On the activities of the China Medical Board, see the “Rockefeller
Foundation Annual Report,’ 1922, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-
content/uploads/Annual-Report-1922-1.pdf.

Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism,” 22.

Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism,’ 30.

McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 27.

Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600-1950 (Boston: Brill,
2012), 689.

Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem, 93.

George Parker, “Lord Sassoon to Join Jardine Matheson,’ Financial Times, January 3, 2013,
https://www.ft.com/content/1a7c4e5c-55ad-11e2-bbd1-00144feab49a.

“All the World’s a Fair, Parts 1-4/’ January 3, 2021, Pseudodoxology Podcast Network,
https://patreon.com/posts/45747840.

Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs,
ePub (London: Verso, 2004), 44.

Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 167-68.

Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 168.

Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 195.

41
42

43
44

45

46
47

48

49
50
51
52
53

54
55

56

57
58
59
60
61
62

63
64
65
66

67

“Guide to the George White Papers,” https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6k40059b/.

H. P Albarelli, Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation Into Who Killed JFK (NY: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2021), 94.

Albarelli, Coup in Dallas, 101.

“NRO, Mafia, Organization A/O Membership, BKG, Criminal Act, Method of Operation,
Legitimate Enterprises, Polit Act, Cuba,’ FBI Memo, October 11, 1955,

Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019), 123.

Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief, 126.

H. P. Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson, and the CIA's Secret Cold War
Experiments, 1st ed (Oregon: Trine Day, 2009), 744.

Jonathan Marshall, “Cooking the Books: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the China Lobby
and Cold War Propaganda, 1950-1962,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 11, no. 37 (September 15,
2013), https://apjjf.org/-Jonathan-Marshall/3997/article.pdf.

Marshall, “Cooking the Books.’

Bertil Linter, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (Routledge, 2019), 62.
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162.

McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162.

Peter Dale Scott, “Operation Paper: The United States and Drugs in Thailand and Burma,’ The
Asia-Pacific Journal 8, no. 44 (November 1, 2010), https://apjjf.org/-Peter-Dale-
Scott/3436/article.pdf.

Linter, Burma in Revolt, 104.

See, for example, “20 Children,’ Miami Herald, November 20, 1954,

Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War
(Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merril Company, Inc., 1972), 7,

John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 125.
Prados, Safe for Democracy, 196-197.

Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 44.

Ed Reid, The Mistress and the Mafia: The Virginia Hill Story (Bantan Books, 1972), 42.

Scott, The War Conspiracy, 207.

“GOP ‘Regulars’ Hit At ‘Harmful’ Tactics In State Ike Group,’ Tampa Bay Times, August 25,
1952.

“GOP Regulars’ Hit.’

Scott, The War Conspiracy, 241.

R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (Linden Pub, 1988), 292.

Rajeev Syal, “Drug Money Saved Banks in Global Crisis, Claims UN Advisor,’ The Guardian,

banks-saved-un-cfief-claims.

“Transnational Crime Is a $1.6 Trillion to $2.2 Trillion Annual ‘Business, Finds New GFI
Report,’ Global Financial Integrity, March 27, 2017, https://gfintegrity.org/press-

68

69

70

71

72

73

74
75

76

77
78

79
80

81
82

83
84
85
86

87
88
89
90
91

release/transnational-crime-is-a-1-6-trillion-to-2-2-trillion-annual-business-finds-new-gfi-
report/.

“Money Laundering,’ United Nations : Office on Drugs and Crime,
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html.

“Super Rich Hold $32 Trillion in Offshore Havens,” Reuters, July 22, 2012,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-offshore-wealth-idUSBRE86L03U20120722.

Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the
Age of Oil (New Catalyst Books, 2004), 60.

Chris Sanders and Catherine Austin Fitts, “The Black Budget of the United States: The Engine
of a ‘Negative Return Economy?” World Affairs 8, no. 2 (April-June 2004), 29-30.

Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern
Establishment (Random House, 1975), 86.

Gus Russo, Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s
Hidden Power Brokers, 1st U.S. ed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 16.

Russo, Supermob, 20.

On Patrick Hoy at the Hotel Sherman, see the Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1957, 52.
Interestingly, the operator of the Hotel Sherman was famed hotelier Ernie Byfield. Byfield’s
son, Ernie Byfield Jr., served in the OSS. After he passed away, his wife remarried to Robert
McNamara in 2004. “Ex-U.S. Defense Secretary Remarries,” AP News, September 16, 2004,
https://apnews.com/article/7a9915a3b31¢cd47f699e07c586224518.

Jonathan Marshall, Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of
American Democracy: From Truman to Trump, Additional Endnotes (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2021), 28, https://rowman.com/WebDocs/Dark_Quadrant_Extra_Notes.pdf.
Russo, Supermob, 37.

“New West,’ New West Communications, 1976, Volume 1, p. 27,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/New_West/6SkcAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.
Russo, Supermob, 202.

Jane Applegate, “The History of MCA,’ Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1990,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-27-fi-5451-story.html.

Russo, Supermob, 43.

Mike Barnes, “Edie Wasserman, Wife of Lew Wasserman, Dies at 95,’ The Hollywood Reporter,

man-wife-lew-wasserman-225101/.
Russo, Supermob, 204.

Russo, Supermob, 100.

Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 252-253.

Dan E. Moldea, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (New York, N.Y: Viking, 1987),
37.

Russo, Supermob, 231.

Moldea, Dark Victory, 254.

Russo, Supermob, 306.

Russo, Supermob, 100.

Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 285.

92

93
94
95

96

97
98
99

100

101

102

103

104

105
106
107

108
109

110

111

112

“Trading Unit Bridges Foreign Exchange Gap’, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1947;
“Foreign Trade: Idealism, Inc., TIME, October 6, 1947,

Russo, Supermob, 68-9.
Russo, Supermob, 93.

David Cay Johnston. “Court Upholds Tax Evasion Ruling,’ New York Times News Service,
February 4, 2007.

Gene Ayres and Jeff Morgan, “Pension Fund Loans Buy Luxury,’ Oakland Tribune, September
23, 1969.

Ayres and Morgan, “Pension Fund.”
Russo, Supermob, 67.
Lee Dembart, “Teamster Pension Chiefs May Quit,’ New York Times, October 13, 1976,

trustees-of-teamsters-pension.html.
Russo, Supermob, 440.

Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, 1st ed (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984),
80.

Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money
Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Connecticut: Praeger, 2004), 45.

Alan A. Block, Space, Time & Organized Crime, 2nd ed (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers,
1994), 354.

Martin A Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the
Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 245.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire, 40.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire, 35.

Tom J. Farer, Transnational Crime in the Americas: An Inter-American Dialogue Book (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 67.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire, 42.

Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, Oversight Hearings Into the
Operations of the IRS, 1975, 917.

Victor Merina, “Two Promoters Indicted in Southland Land Fraud,” Los Angeles Times,
October 5, 1982.

Jim Drinkhall, “CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case,” Washington Post,

quash-major-star-studded-tax-evasion-case/a55ddf06-2a3f-4e04-a687-a3dd87¢32b82/.
“Fugitive Vesco Indicted In Drug Conspiracy,’ New York Times, April 18, 1989,
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/18/us/fugitive-vesco-indicted-in-drug-conspiracy.html.

CHAPTER 2

BOOZE AND BLACKMAIL

THE WHISKY MEN

er his own account, Samuel Bronfman had never planned to become one of North

Americas top liquor magnates, having previously aspired to a career in law.
Nevertheless, true to his family’s last name, which means “whisky man” in Yiddish, he
and his brothers went on to build a liquor empire that would rocket the Bronfmans
into the upper echelons of the Western business elite, though the road they traveled to
get there was hardly elegant.

While the Bronfmans are now remembered as scions of Canada’s upper class, this
was certainly not the case when Samuel’s parents — Mindel and Yechiel Bronfman —
brought the family to Canada from Bessarabia, now part of modern-day Moldova and
Ukraine, in 1889. They had left as part of a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing the anti-
Semitic pogroms of czarist Russia, leaving behind a somewhat profitable tobacco
farming business.

In Bessarabia, they had been relatively well off and had emigrated to Canada along
with two of their servants and their personal rabbi. However, Canada, particularly
Manitoba where the Bronfmans eventually settled, was poorly suited for tobacco
farming, forcing Yechiel to labor on Canadian railroads and in sawmills before moving
into the sale of firewood and the trading of livestock and fish. It would be their trading
of horses that would eventually lead them to begin work in the hospitality sector and,
subsequently, the liquor business.+

The Bronfmans’ beginnings, particularly following their arrival in Canada, stand in
such stark contrast to their current reputation that even Sam's sons, Edgar and
Charles, were kept in the dark by their own father regarding the family business’ early
days. “He would never tell us any of the early history,’ Edgar Bronfman would later
remember of his father. A Bronfman biographer — former senior editor at The
Economist, Nicholas Faith — would also write that “underlying the family’s riches was a
deep sense of shame as to their origins” and that Sam's generation had “shared an

absolute refusal to tell their offspring anything about their life before their arrival in
the Promised Land,’ i.e., Canada.

Part of the reason for this secrecy, even within the family and between father and
son, was likely related to the personal struggle of many immigrants, some of whom
choose to turn their back on their lives prior to immigrating and strive to establish and
prove their connections to the new land in which they find themselves. Indeed, Sam
Bronfman went to great lengths to do just that, publicly claiming for much of his late
life that he had been born on March 4, 1891 in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada,
obfuscating both his real date and place of birth — February 27, 1889, Bessarabia.2
Michael Marrus, one of Bronfman’s more sympathetic biographers, would write that
Sam Bronfman never truly “abandoned his enthusiastic identification with the country
in which his career began, and [his attempts to obfuscate his place of birth] is perhaps
the most significant indication of his obsession with the respectability he associated
with Canadian citizenship.”

While Sam Bronfman was undoubtedly ill at ease with his status as an immigrant,
there is another factor that may explain his unwillingness, and that of his seven
siblings, to discuss the family’s “early days” and, specifically, the chain of events and
eventual alliances with unsavory characters that would lead them to the top of
Canada’s business elite.

At some point in the early 1890s, as he sampled spirits in a dingy saloon after
selling off some horses, Yechiel Bronfman mulled the merits of leaving behind a life of
hard labor in favor of the intertwined businesses of hospitality and liquor sales. Sam
Bronfman would later claim that it was actually he who had convinced his father to
move into hospitality and bartending, though most biographers doubt this, given
Sam’s age at the time.* Regardless, it would be over a decade before the Bronfman
family patriarch and his eldest sons managed to scrape together the funds necessary to
realize Yechiel’s dreams.

The Bronfmans had saved enough money to lease their first Canadian hotel, the
Anglo-American Hotel in Emerson, Manitoba, by 1903.2 Soon, they acquired several
more hotels in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and later in Winnipeg and beyond, building a
small yet profitable network of hotels prior to the onset of World War I. The dramatic
shift in the family’s fortune was largely thanks to the business acumen of Sam's brother
Harry, who managed to stave off the financial damage and legal trouble caused by the
gambling and other “unseemly” habits of their older brother, Abe.

Sam Bronfman formally joined the new family business in 1907, though he would
later regale some of his biographers with tales of how he had been the original
“dynamo” behind the family’s success in hospitality, despite considerable evidence to

the contrary. What is notable, however, is the fact that, not long after Sam formally
became involved in hotel management, the family’s hotels were targeted by a series of
unfortunate accusations, including when they went to renew their liquor license in
Yorktown in 1908. Locals had alleged that the Bronfmans were guilty of violating local
liquor laws and condoning illegal gambling in their inns. The latter is particularly
likely given the well-known gambling habits of Abe Bronfman, which were known to
have threatened the family business on more than one occasion.

The same year that Sam joined the family’s hotel business, the organization that
would eventually bring “Prohibition” to Canada also emerged, the Social and Moral
Reform Council. A joining of the leadership of various Protestant churches, the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Royal Templars of Temperance and other
like-minded groups, the Social and Moral Reform Council was born out of a far-
reaching Protestant religious movement of the period, known as the “Social Gospel”
movement, that sought to “fight social evils,” particularly those caused or exacerbated
by rapid urbanization and industrialization.4 For groups like the Social and Moral
Reform Council, liquor quickly became a main target.

The Council and its allies managed to successfully appeal to many Canadians,
both those who shared and lacked their religious zeal, as bars and saloons were often
disliked for other reasons aside from their “moral depravity,” such as their often far-
reaching stenches and the fact that around a third of criminal prosecutions at the time
were related to drunkenness. Though the Temperance movement in Canada deeply
divided its population, it got the boost it needed to become common policy with the
onset of the First World War.

In Canada, Prohibition was initially a provincial matter, with a handful of
provinces having enacted Prohibition laws prior to the war. Yet, once the curtain of
war had fallen, many Canadians came to believe that banning the sale, trade and
manufacture of alcohol would aid the war effort. As a result, most Canadian provinces
enacted some sort of alcohol ban prior to Canada’s short-lived federal ban, enacted
near the end of the war in 1918 and expiring a year after hostilities ended.2 The impact
of Prohibition on Canada’s liquor industry was substantial and felt long after it was
repealed, with 75% of its breweries having closed by 1928. However, Prohibition was
conveniently fortuitous for some, the Bronfmans chief among them.

Given the provincial nature of Prohibition in Canada prior to its brief stint as a
federal policy, the differences between the Temperance laws of various provinces
provided numerous loopholes that the Bronfmans were able to exploit to great effect.
So successful were the Bronfmans at aptly working in the gray area of the varied and
often temporary gaps between provincial laws that author Peter Newman remarked in

his biography of the Bronfmans, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World,
“Sometimes it almost seemed that the American Congress and the Canadian federal
and provincial legislatures must have secretly held a grand conclave to decide one
issue: How they could draft anti-liquor laws and regulations that would help maximize
the Bronfman brothers’ bootlegging profits? 12

In one example, during World War I, the three eldest Bronfman brothers (Abe,
Harry, and Sam) exploited the fact that Manitoba and Ontario, while prohibiting the
sale of liquor within the province, allowed alcohol to be imported. The brothers set up
several mail-order liquor businesses throughout these two provinces and profited
handsomely, that is until the ban on interprovincial trading would go into effect in
1918 with federal Prohibition.

However, federal Prohibition also came with a loophole, which allowed alcohol to
be sold for “medicinal purposes.” This prompted Harry Bronfman to create a
wholesale drug company that permitted him to import alcohol in bulk and provide it
to area pharmacies. He placed its offices next door to one of the family’s ritzier hotels,
the Balmoral, and its business model involved offering doctors a bonus for each liquor
prescription they wrote if that prescription was fulfilled by a pharmacy whose liquor
was furnished by the Bronfmans.4

Canadian writer Mordecai Richler would later allege that the initial license for
Harry’s new enterprise, named the Canada Pure Drug Company, was acquired by a
well-placed bribe to a prominent politician“ Other family biographers, like Michael
Marrus, called the firm “a thinly disguised liquor outlet that soon pumped more
whiskey into retail drugstores than any other wholesaler in Saskatchewan”! The
company also benefitted from the corruption of the province's liquor commission,
which allowed a percentage of the liquor it seized to be sold back to Harry Bronfman,
who then resold it an exorbitantly marked-up price.

Subsequent government investigations that were part of a Royal Commission
would further allege that the Bronfman family “drug” company was “never engaged in
the drug business, but confined its activities to the sale of alcohol in the western
provinces,” adding that the company imported hundreds of thousands of gallons of
alcohol from the United States.44 Out of the Bronfman brothers, it had been Sam who
was sent to travel across Canada and the United States, which allowed him to build a
vast network that included numerous American and Canadian distilleries and
bootleggers. This network would, in a few years, prove essential to the Bronfmans,
especially Sam, once Prohibition arrived in Canada’s southern neighbor, the United
States.

THE MANY FRIENDS OF MR. SAM

Borm the complicity of corrupt officials and doctors, a driving force behind the

Bronfman family’s Prohibition era success was their ties, forged by Sam, to the
Hudson’s Bay Company, long a dominant force in Canada’s economy backed by the
political and economic elite of England since its founding in the 1600s. According to
Nicholas Faith, Hudson’s Bay Company “trusted him [Sam] implicitly after he had
refused to make any profit on a couple of thousand cases of Dewar’s whisky that
Hudson's Bay wanted to buy back from him.” However, in the cutthroat and often
extremely violent world of bootlegging in Canada, “implicit trust” was unlikely to have
been granted from just a single act.

More likely was the fact that Hudson's Bay Company had long been the dominant
force in Canada’s liquor industry and had every intention of continuing to operate its
liquors business during Prohibition. The Bronfmans were sure to have caught their
attention early on, not just through their mail order business, but because Harry
Bronfman had quickly gained a reputation as “the king of bootleggers” who was able
to easily skirt the law due to his contacts with corrupt local and provincial officials.
His brother Sam sought to focus the entire family business on liquor early on in
Prohibition, which would have made him a critical contact for any business seeking to
clandestinely deal with the Bronfmans'’ sale of spirits during this period.®

The Hudson’s Bay Company’s import of liquor into Canada by various means
during Prohibition greatly aided the business of several distillers in England and
Scotland. Many of those British distillers boasted close ties to the royal family and
England’s political elite, like Dewar’s. These companies risked losing a considerable
amount of income if their ability to export spirits to Canada had been entirely cut off,
especially at a time when drinking in England was on the wane. The British
government itself was clearly aware of these concerns and made the promotion of
exports, liquor in particular, a key policy aimed at offsetting the country’s considerable
war debts.1®

Direct ties of the company to bootlegging in Canada emerged when British
Colombia's Prohibition Commissioner, Walter Findlay, was caught engaging in and
profiting from the illegal liquor trade. At his trial, the existence of “a liquor delivery
service run by the Hudson's Bay Company” that sent alcohol to private addresses and
spanned the nation was revealed, despite Findlay’s refusal to testify.

Whatever the real story was behind the ties that were forged between Sam
Bronfman and the Hudson's Bay Company, the dominant distillers of England and

Scotland that held great sway over the company’s liquor subsidiary would be critical to
Bronfman’s success during and after Prohibition, and he to theirs.

Soon after the conclusion of Canadian prohibition, Prohibition went into effect in
the United States in January 1920. The Bronfmans, now largely under Sam’s
leadership, continued to import American liquor at incredible quantities, but at a
much cheaper rate given that the new law had made it essentially worthless in its
country of origin. That imported liquor was then mixed with raw alcohol and water.
This degradation allowed the Bronfmans to ship a much larger quantity of the liquor
than they had purchased back into the United States.1 Such was the story of the
Bronfman family’s initial entry into the distilling business.

As stock from American distilleries began to run out in 1923, the Bronfmans built
a distillery near Montreal. They named their newest venture Distillers Corporation
Limited, the same name as the then-unrelated and significantly more prestigious
Scottish company that included the top five whisky and gin producers in the British
Isles. The name the Bronfmans had chosen was no coincidence, as the “audacious”
name Sam had chosen for the family’s first distillery succeeded in attracting the near-
immediate attention of the Scottish firm. The Bronfman family subsequently formed a
joint venture with the elite of Scotland’s and England's liquor industry, thereby uniting
the two companies that shared the name Distillers Corporation Limited. Their union
also allowed the Bronfmans to secure the exclusive rights to import many of the top
brands from “across the pond.” Roughly a decade later, in the 1930s, Samuel
Bronfman purchased and built a number of distilleries in Scotland, further deepening
his ties to the liquor barons of the “Old World.”

The ability of the Bronfmans to secure this deal at the time likely owed to Sam’s
pre-existing ties to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had previously imported many
of the brands united under the British Distillers Company Limited. Another potential
factor was the “chance” meeting between one of the Bronfman’s “middlemen,” Lewis
Rosenstiel, and Winston Churchill in 1922. A year later, Bronfman traveled to
Kentucky, where Rosenstiel was based at the time, and purchased an ailing distillery,
the components of which were then shipped North and used to create the Bronfman’s
first distillery.

Churchill had deep family and personal ties to the Hudson’s Bay Company and,
from 1919 to 1922, he was in charge of Britains Colonial Office.22 In this capacity,
Churchill refused to use British authority or influence to interfere with the liquor
trade in any British colony, including in British-dominated “Rum Row” where the
Bronfmans were also active. Churchill argued that England was not obligated to
enforce the laws of another nation, and would later call Prohibition as a policy “an

affront to the whole history of mankind.’2+ Churchill would later emerge as a key
investor in America’s post-Prohibition liquor industry, which Bronfman and
Rosenstiel would quickly come to dominate.2#

As the Bronfman family’s clout in the liquor industry grew after Prohibition, Sam
Bronfman would later manage to personally meet Queen Elizabeth II of England and
he would even create a Canadian whisky, Crown Royal, to specifically commemorate
her visit to Canada in 1939.

Five years after creating the successful joint venture with Distillers Company
Limited, the Bronfman’s Distillers Corporation Limited purchased Joseph E.
Seagram's and Sons Limited and their distillery in Water-loo, Ontario. The merged
company became Seagram Company Limited, or Seagram's, and would serve as the
Bronfman family’s financial vehicle, not just for their ever-expanding liquor empire,
but their subsequent interests in chemicals, oil, and entertainment.

Though his British and Scottish connections were important to his and Seagram’s
success, Sam Bronfman’s rise as a global liquor baron also depended significantly on
the ties he had forged, often through his “middlemen,’ with more unsavory actors,
namely key figures in North American organized crime. Many of them still live on in
American urban legend and were discussed at length in the previous chapter,
including Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Moe Dalitz, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer
Lansky, and members of Detroit's Purple Gang, among others.

Much of the Bronfmans’ early involvement in bootlegging took place across the
Saskatchewan-North Dakota border in “boozoriums” where their liquor could be
purchased in Canada and then moved to their final destination in the United States.
Yet, the murder of a Bronfman brother-in-law turned associate, and the promise of
more lucrative markets for Bronfman booze soon drew their attention elsewhere.

“We were late starters in the two most lucrative markets — on the high seas and
across the Detroit River. What came out of the border trade in Saskatchewan was
insignificant by comparison,’ Bronfman once told Canadian journalist Terence
Robertson. Despite being late to the game, “this was when we started to make our real
money,” Bronfman recounted.”

The bootlegging operation of the Bronfmans would later extend far beyond the
Canadian-US border, with the family establishing warehouses and fronts throughout
the Caribbean and Mexico. They were encircling their main market — the United
States — like prey.

Of course, with great profit came great risk, and though they avoided major legal
trouble for their ties to bootlegging operations during American Prohibition, it caught
up with them soon after. In 1934, the Bronfman brothers were charged with

conspiracy “to violate the statutes of a friendly country” and for evading taxes on
liquor that they had exported out of Canada.

Soon after the charges were announced, Sam Bronfman allegedly ordered the
destruction of thousands of documents aimed at “shielding their early operations from
inquisitorial eyes” and Bronfman-owned companies tied to smuggling and their assets
would mysteriously vanish. As a result, the case against the Bronfmans ran into an
insurmountable roadblock and the four Bronfman brothers were acquitted on all
charges by the summer of 1935. They even managed to settle with US authorities,
negotiating a $3 million settlement with the Treasury Department, a mere fraction of
what they had gained during American Prohibition.

Most of Bronfman’s mob associates during American Prohibition were members
of, or somehow tied to, the National Crime Syndicate. This Syndicate, described in
detail in the previous chapter, was subsequently defined by the 1950s Senate
investigative body, the Kefauver Committee, as a confederation of organized crime
interests then dominated by the Italian-American mafia and the Jewish-American
mob. During the Kefauver Committee's investigation, some of the biggest players in
the American Mafia named Bronfman as a central figure in their bootlegging
operations.

Though Sam was careful to distance himself as much as possible from prominent
criminals, he did have a somewhat cozy relationship with Meyer Lanksy, with Lansky’s
wife later recounting how Bronfman had thrown lavish dinner parties for her husband.
The relationship appears to have begun in 1923 when Lansky bought Sam prized
tickets to the boxing championship between Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo in New
York, likely a gesture aimed at gaining Sam's favor, or perhaps returning one.
Subsequently, Lansky would, among other thing, offer exclusive protection of
Bronfman’s booze shipments.

In his old age, Lansky, apparently bitter that Bronfman had managed to launder his
post-Prohibition reputation into that of an “upstanding” member of North American
aristocracy, would remark “Why is Lansky a ‘gangster’ and not the Bronfman and
Rosenstiel families? I was involved with all of them in the 1920s, although they do not
like to talk about it and change the subject when my name is mentioned.”

The ties between the Bronfman family business and organized crime may explain
why some past efforts to chronicle the rise of the Bronfmans were ill-fated, particularly
during Sam Bronfman’s lifetime. The first person who attempted to write a biography
of Samuel Bronfman, Terence Robertson, had traveled to New York to investigate
Bronfman and the then-sprawling corporate empire of Seagram's. While in New York,

he had allegedly concluded the book, but had telephoned a journalist colleague back

in Canada, distraught. In that phone call, Robertson claimed to have “found out things
about Sam, they didn’t want me to write about.”

Robertson would call a second colleague, stressing that his “life had been
threatened and we would know who was doing the threatening but that he would do
the job himself?” After receiving the frantic call and fearing that Robertson's life was in
danger, the second journalist called the New York police, who quickly responded, only
to find Robertson dying of barbiturate poisoning, to which he succumbed.
Robertson's lengthy interviews with Bronfman were never published, but still exist in
manuscript form.

Subsequent attempts to author a biography of Sam Bronfman and his family’s rise
to prominence also failed to make it to publication, such as the effort made by former
editor of the Canadian edition of TIME magazine, John Scott, and another made by
Canadian journalist Erna Paris. However, some books on the Bronfman family did
emerge once Sam had reached old age, such as an account of the family by Peter
Newman and a novel by Mordecai Richler believed to have been inspired by the
Bronfmans. The Bronfmans apparently did not take kindly to their portrayal by either
Newman or Richler, both of whom were Jewish, prompting the family behind
Seagram's to allege that both authors were “anti-Semitic Jews.’ The Bronfman clan has
always been sensitive to critical reports, given that their longstanding efforts to
develop their reputation as elite “philanthropists” are marred by the evidence of the
symbiotic relationship between their family business and organized crime.

THE MIDDLEMEN

Ae from these more personal ties, also crucial to the success of Seagram's and
he Bronfman family enterprise during this period were an assortment of
“middlemen.” Two of these men were particularly essential to the Bronfman business
— Joseph Reinfeld and the aforementioned Lewis “Lew” Rosenstiel. The two men
were of extremely different temperaments, with Reinfeld being described as “a jovial,
avuncular Jewish immigrant from Poland” whereas Rosenstiel was described as “loud,
opinionated and domineering.”

Reinfeld served as a close advisor to Sam Bronfman as well as an important
business associate as he was the principal purchaser of Seagram’s Whiskey. It was also
Reinfeld who convinced Sam to “build up inventory” prior to and during Prohibition,
which would help Bronfman secure a significant portion of the post-Prohibition
liquor market. He also managed much of the in-person dealings with crime-linked

individuals on Bronfman’s behalf, which was key to Bronfman’s winning strategy to
mitigate legal risks and prevent further damage to his social reputation.

The end result saw Reinfeld buy large amounts of Seagram’s liquor, mainly at Rum
Row, while ensuring that the Bronfmans did not have to directly deal with their final,
crime-linked customers. However, in at least one instance, Reinfeld actually brought
Sam Bronfman, and his family business, into close contact with a notorious mobster.
By 1923, the Reinfeld syndicate was half-owned by Longy Zwillman, who Reinfeld
sent to negotiate directly with Sam Bronfman. Bronfman was reportedly very
impressed with Zwillman, then in his early 20s, calling him “well-behaved” and
“studious looking,” adding that “you'd never guess he was a shtarker:”2®

Reinfeld’s operation during Prohibition was massive, and massively profitable for
Bronfman. Government investigators later revealed that Reinfeld had “imported
nearly 40 percent of all the illicit alcohol consumed in the United States during
Prohibition.” Retired US Treasury agents later testified that the Bronfman family were
Reinfeld’s main supplier, while also alleging that much of Reinfeld’s ill-gotten profits
had been laundered in Canada, some of it allegedly laundered with the help of
Seagram's employees. The use of Canadian institutions as laundries for Reinfeld is not
only plausible but likely, given the intimate involvement of the Royal Bank of Canada
in Rum Row, the same place where Reinfeld had received his shipments of Bronfman
liquor. The Bronfmans themselves were known to operate a network of shell
companies, some registered to fictitious individuals and linked to a series of both
domestic and foreign bank accounts. This network facilitated the family’s own
“elaborate money laundering operations,’ according to Canadian historian Stephen
Schneider.

The close association between Bronfman and Reinfeld would later come back to
haunt them both, particularly when Reinfeld’s longtime bodyguard, James Rutkin,
testified in front of the Kefauver Committee in the early 1950s. Rutkin would tell all
regarding the “early days” of the Bronfman family business, including the relationships
of both Bronfman and Reinfeld with mobsters like Zwillman and Lansky. Some
Bronfman family biographers, like Nicholas Faith, have alleged that Rutkin sought to
use his testimony in a failed attempt to blackmail the Bronfmans, threatening to reveal
more if he was left uncompensated.

Among Rutkin’s claims regarding the Bronfmans, several pertained to the family’s
hotel business in Canada that had preceded their liquor empire. Rutkin, describing the
Bronfmans as “four brothers from Montreal,” teased the Kefauver Committee, stating
first that “if you want to find out more about the [Bronfman owned] hotels, you can
ask the Canadian Mounted Police, and they will tell you about the little hotels, and

you can use your imagination.” He later added that these hotels serviced people who
slept “very fast,” and that the same room would be rented “quite a few times during the
night,” implying that the hotels were in fact brothels. Several Bronfman family
biographers also mention these accusations, which had dogged the family since their
earliest days in the hotel business. Some believe that Sam Bronfman tacitly confirmed
that this was the case many years after Rutkin first made these claims, when he
remarked “If they were [brothels], they were the best in the West!”28

Nevertheless, in the early 1950s at the time of the Kefauver hearings, the
Bronfmans alleged that Rutkin’s claims were “absurd,” and they declined to pony up
any of the “hush money” that Rutkin was rumored to have been seeking. Yet, despite
their best efforts, Rutkin’s testimony, which received considerable publicity due to the
televised broadcast of the hearings, created a whirlwind of rumors that refused to be
snuffed out for some time, at least until Rutkin turned up dead, having allegedly slit
his own throat with a borrowed razor in 1956.22

Lewis Rosenstiel, the other most prominent of Sam Bronfman’s Prohibition Era
“middlemen,” saw his relationship with the Seagram’s chairman take a completely
different trajectory than that of Bronfman and Reinfeld. As Prohibition neared its end,
Rosenstiel and Bronfman would grow into bitter rivals, despite continuing to share
many of the same contacts in the North America’s criminal underworld.

THE CHAIRMAN

hile Sam Bronfman struggled with his would-be biographers, no biography was
ever written of his one-time middleman and later chief rival, Lewis Rosenstiel.
Of those books and other writings that do touch on Rosenstiel’s history and
demeanor, few are favorable. For instance, a 1959 piece in Esquire offers one of the
more favorable accounts, calling Rosenstiel “intelligent, articulate and extraordinarily
aggressive, adding that he often “slopes in his chair, plays with his tongue as he speaks,
and utters his strong opinions with a growl, expressing dislike and contempt for
anyone who might disagree”30
Others, like Bronfman biographer Nicholas Faith, describe Rosenstiel as “loud,
opinionated and domineering,’ a “hulking figure who favored amber-tinted glasses,
which he rarely removed, and large cigars to go with his status as one of the wealthiest
men alive”% The New York Times obituary for Rosenstiel uses similar terms, referring
to the liquor baron known to many simply as “the Chairman” as having been “a

domineering man with [a] quick temper”?

Official accounts of Rosenstiel’s past and how he built his company Schenley into
a corporate behemoth seem oddly sanitized, not unlike the official accounts of the
Bronfman family’s early days that decline to mention the darker side of their business
model that was particularly important to their activities prior to the repeal of
American Prohibition.

Born in 1891 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Rosenstiel — thanks to an unfortunate injury
during a football match in his teenage years — dropped out of high school and went to
work for his uncle at the Susquemac Distilling Company in Milton, Kentucky in 1907.
Rosenstiel worked on largely menial tasks at the facility, including as a “pinhooker”
rolling barrels in warehouses and as a belt splicer. His fortunes shifted dramatically
from those humble beginnings during the era of American Prohibition, with little
being known of his life during the period, aside from him allegedly leaving the tedious
tasks of his uncle's distillery behind to become a “whisky broker.’

According to official accounts, Rosenstiel turned to selling shoes and bonds once
Prohibition set in, with his prior line of work in the distilling and sale of spirits drying
up. Yet, somehow, the young Rosenstiel accumulated enough money to afford a
vacation to the French Riviera in 1922. It was during that vacation that he would be
lucky enough to score a “chance” meeting with Winston Churchill, “who advised him
to prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States,” per the New York Times.*3
There is little, if any, context given in official accounts as to how or why a high-school
dropout turned distillery worker and shoe salesman would have attracted the
attention of a notorious elitist and member of the British aristocracy like Churchill.

As the story goes, Rosenstiel spent the next ten years of his life dutifully following
Churchill’s advice. He somehow convinced one of the most powerful banks on Wall
Street, Lehman Brothers, to offer him a massive loan to finance his acquisition of
closed distilleries and to accumulate aged whisky inventories for the yet-to-materialize
date of repeal. Again, no official explanation is offered as to how an elite banking
institution like Lehman Brothers would grant someone with Rosenstiel’s background
such a large amount of capital based merely on advice he had received from a British
politician, suggesting there is more to the story.

Returning to the official narrative of Rosenstiel’s rise, we are told that Rosenstiel
then incorporated Schenley Distillers Company in the wake of Repeal in 1933. He
was conveniently well-placed to become “the most powerful figure in the distilled
spirits business,” all thanks to him having heeded Churchill’s advice and thanks to a
remarkable patience that he was never known to have possessed during any other

point in his life + Indeed, per these same official sources, impatience, rather than

patience, was one of Rosenstiel’s most well-known traits, with his characterization by
media as a “domineering man with a quick temper” being one of many examples.

Of course, as should be clear to the reader, this narrative conveniently obfuscates
any hint of illegality in Rosenstiel’s Prohibition era dealings and fails to mention
Rosenstiel’s documented ties to organized crime figures or his role as a prominent
purchaser of Bronfman liquor alongside Joseph Reinfeld and other Seagram’s
“middlemen.” Years later, James P. Kelly, chief investigator for the Interstate and
Foreign Commerce Committee of the New York House of Representatives, testified
under oath that Rosenstiel had been part of an “underworld consortium” that bought
Bronfman liquor and sold it throughout the United States during Prohibition.

Key figures in this consortium, aside from Rosenstiel, included Meyer Lansky as
well as Joe Fusco, an associate of Al Capone, and Joe Linsey, a Boston-based criminal
associated with Joe Kennedy’s bootlegging operations. Kelly added that the Rosenstiel
was “particularly close” to Lansky, and it later emerged that they had “owned points
together” in mob-operated businesses. He was also reportedly close to Frank Costello,
who was said to have attended a business meeting alongside Rosenstiel “to give [the
meeting’s attendees] a message that Rosenstiel was one of their people”3£

One of Rosenstiel’s ex-wives, Susan Kaufman, later told journalist Anthony
Summers that, in Summers’ words, “living with Rosenstiel was to live with the
command structure of organized crime.” Kaufman's testimony to Summers includes
numerous, specific, and very detailed allegations of the various meetings between her
ex-husband and organized crime figures she witnessed during their marriage,
including business meetings where Rosenstiel was given “thousands and thousands
and thousands of dollars in bundles of cash” from Lansky.

After Prohibition, Fusco and Linsey took their operations into the legal and
legitimate business world, just as Rosenstiel had done. They set up legitimate
companies in Chicago and Boston, respectively, to market Schenley products. As a
result, Rosenstiel maintained his links to the criminal underworld long after publicly
transitioning from bootlegger to businessman. Frequent dinner guests at Rosenstiel’s
home in the years and decades after Prohibition included legendary figures of
American organized crime, including Frank Costello, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante
and Meyer Lansky. Lansky was known to address Rosenstiel as “Supreme
Commander,’ a name that Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s attorney and close friend, also used
for the liquor baron.*4

Rosenstiel’s transition from bootlegger to businessman very nearly included a
direct partnership with Sam Bronfman. In 1929, as the end of Prohibition neared,
Bronfman invested $585,000 in a Rosenstiel-owned distillery producing “medicinal

spirits” and had acquired a 20% stake in Rosenstiel’s company. Per Sam, however, he
concluded after visiting Rosenstiel’s distillery that it was “a piece of junk and ... on the
inside it was even worse” and he was allegedly offended at the inferiority of his whisky
production method. It’s unclear if this was the actual motive for their falling out, but,
regardless, their subsequent business and personal rivalries became legendary.

According to Nicholas Faiths account of Bronfman’s life, the falling out with
Rosenstiel, whatever the cause, took a tremendous emotional toll on the two men
before it descended into a decades-long, acrimonious spat. Faith asserts that
Bronfman’s failure to reach an agreement with Rosenstiel “really hit him, for he came
down with severe flu” soon after calling off any possibility of a partnership. Despite
being gravely ill, Bronfman told Rosenstiel that “we have nothing to discuss” when the
latter had arrived to attempt to salvage a deal. Terence Robertson's manuscript, as
cited by Faith, states that Rosenstiel “all but wept as he begged ‘for just a minute with
my friend.”=8

Their feud would subsequently escalate to such an extent that it would transcend
business competition, with a 1959 article in Esquire noting that either man “appears
willing to sacrifice profit to do the other in the eye.’ Rosenstiel was known to refer to
Bronfman and his business as “unscrupulous alien competition,’ with alien in this
instance meaning foreign, i.e. Canadian.22 Bronfman, for his part, was known to
become angry rather quickly when Rosenstiel’s name or business came up, saying he
had “no admiration” for the man, and would frequently refer to him as
“Rosenschlemiel,’ with “schlemiel” meaning something along the lines of simpleton or
a born loser in Yiddish.“ It was also alleged that Bronfman’s lavish Seagram building
in New York City had been planned to make “Rosenstiel’s 1930s-style offices in the

Empire State Building look just a little shabby in their luxury 4

THE KING OF BOURBON AND BLACKMAIL

hough both men had legendary tempers and a legendary feud to match,

Bronfman and Rosenstiel had major differences in character, particularly in how
they managed their respective businesses and in their personal lives. One of these
differences was the fact that Sam Bronfman did not share Rosenstiel’s obsession with
blackmail.

Indeed, reports of Rosenstiel’s behavior at his company’s offices, as cited by
Nicholas Faith, included Rosenstiel having placed “bugging devices” throughout his
offices. Per Faith, he would treat his employees “like dirt, sacking them at a moment’s
notice” and then go “to the toilet to leave them time to compromise themselves by

talking in his absence.’ Those employees were “compromised” as their conversations
were recorded by the devices that Rosenstiel had strewn about the premises.

Additional assertions made in court and under oath by one of Rosenstiel’s ex-
wives held that Rosenstiel had also placed microphones throughout his home in order
to record conversations that took place at social events he hosted for the alleged
purpose of obtaining potential blackmail against his guests. In addition, several
sources reported to the 1971 New York State Legislative Committee on Crime that
Rosenstiel’s Manhattan home had been “wired from roof to basement with hidden
microphones, so that he could spy on visitors and staff.’

The system in Rosenstiel’s home had been installed by Fred Otash, an infamous
private detective who had used electronic means to spy on the Kennedy family,
Marilyn Monroe, and others. Otash later said that Rosenstiel’s home “was rigged to
tape conversations for hours on end.” Otash had a penchant for blackmail himself,
particularly sexual blackmail - he had once attempted to entrap John F. Kennedy
using a call girl named “Sue Young” in the lead-up to the 1960 presidential election.“8
As we'll see shortly, Rosenstiel was also involved in a broader effort to obtain this
variety of blackmail, which may explain why he had sought out the California-based
Otash to bug his New York home.

Some of the sources that discuss Rosenstiel’s interest in blackmail also claim that
Rosenstiel was bisexual. According to Nicholas Faith, discussions about Rosenstiel’s
bisexuality among Schenley office employees were frequent enough for Rosenstiel to
be referred to as “Rosie” around the office. Additional evidence for these claims later
came from Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman.

Per Kaufman, whose previous marriage had collapsed because her first husband
had been homosexual, she soon discovered that she had made a similar mistake in
marrying Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel was reportedly un-interested in having sex with his
new wife, but “went to great expense to have her dress up in clothes that made her
look like a little girl” He would later be discovered in bed with one of his lawyers,
Roy Cohn, and shrugged it off to his wife by asking for some more “alone time” with
his attorney. Kaufman remembered responding, “I’ve never seen Governor [Thomas]
Dewey in bed with you,” as Dewey was also one of his attorneys at the time, and she
walked out.4®

Kaufman remembered the young Cohn, who was best known for his infamous
stint as Joe McCarthy's chief counsel during the height of the Red Scare, as flaunting
his homosexuality whenever he was around Kaufman, openly caressing a former
congressional associate in front of her and describing the homosexual antics of a close
friend of his and Rosenstiel’s — Cardinal Spellman, one of the most powerful figures in

the Catholic Church in North America. Cohn reportedly was so open with her
because her first husband “had been gay and I must have understood because I'd
stayed with him for nine years,’ Kaufman later stated.4°

In 1958, Kaufman accompanied her husband Lewis Rosenstiel to a “party” hosted
by Cohn at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Kaufman recalled entering through a side
entrance and taking an elevator to the 2" or 3“ floor; her husband knew the way well
enough that she “had the impression [he] had been there before.” The suite was one of
the largest available at the hotel and it was “all done in light blue.” Inside the suite were
Cohn and another figure closely associated with both Cohn and Rosenstiel: FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover. To Kaufman's surprise, Hoover was wearing women’s
clothes and wig, with Cohn introducing him as “Mary” in a bout of barely concealed
laughter. “Mary” was also incidentally the nickname widely used among New York
Catholic clergy for Cardinal Spellman, who was also alleged to attend other parties
hosted by Cohn in the Plaza’s “blue suite.”*4

After being served a few drinks, Kaufman recalled seeing “a couple of boys come
in, young blond boys. I'd say about eighteen or nineteen. And then Roy [Cohn] makes
the signal we should go into the bedroom” Sexual activities between the “young
blond boys,’ Cohn and Hoover ensued, with Kaufman declining to participate after
being urged to do so by her then-husband. The Rosenstiels then left, leaving the boys
alone with Cohn and Hoover. Cohn later laughed about the incident to Kaufman,
saying that “Mary Hoover” attends his parties regularly and that he would make sure
to “arrive at the Plaza first with his clothes [the female clothes allegedly used by
Hoover at the parties] in a suitcase.”

Per her testimony, Kaufman was repulsed by the whole affair, but ended up
attending another of these parties at the Plaza after Rosenstiel bribed her with “an
expensive pair of earrings from Harry Winston’s”® The events of that evening played
out as they had the time before, but the Rosenstiels later quarreled, and she never
attended any more Cohn-hosted parties at the Plaza hotel.

These allegations made by Kaufman resulted in considerable efforts to discredit
her testimony, especially during the 1971 New York State Legislative Committee on
Crime. Kaufman had agreed to serve as a witness for the State regarding her ex-
husband's ties to organized crime figures. The very week that she was due to testify,
Kaufman was hit with an “attempted perjury” charge that was regarded as
unprecedented and bizarre by lawyers and outraged the Committee's Chairman and
Chief Counsel. Kaufman still testified, but mostly behind closed doors, in executive
session. Her testimony — several decades later — still remains sealed.

Members of the Committee believed at the time that the “attempted perjury”
charges had been instigated by Lewis Rosenstiel himself in order to prevent his wife
from testifying, as he had previously used similar tactics to protect his corrupt
dealings.*+ This “attempted perjury” charge has since been used by some authors to
discredit Kaufman's later testimony regarding her ex-husband and his associates.

However, the former Chief Counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge
Edward McLaughlin, and Committee investigator William Gallinaro found Kaufman
to be “an exceptionally good witness” Mc-Laughlin later told journalist and Hoover
biographer Anthony Summers, “I thought her absolutely truthful.... The woman’s
power of recall was phenomenal. Everything she said was checked and double
checked, and everything that was checkable turned out to be true? Additional
evidence corroborating Kaufman as a witness came from two male witnesses who
supported the astonishing allegations of Hoover's habit of cross-dressing, with those
witnesses having learned of the former FBI director's habit at a different time and
place than the events described by Kaufman. They also had no knowledge of Hoover
and the “blue suite” parties in New York.

In addition, Kaufman told Anthony Summers that she possessed photographs
showing Hoover in the company of Lewis Rosenstiel’s organized crime associates.
Though Summers did not see these pictures personally, they were confirmed as
authentic and had been seen by journalist Mary Nichols of the Philadelphia Enquirer.
Nichols told Summers “She did have suitcases of photographs that she had hauled
away from her marriage to Lewis Rosenstiel. The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer
Roy Cohn and Rosenstiel, at all sorts of social events with mobsters.’-3

There is also evidence that, not only did these parties at the Plaza hotel take place,
but that they were used to obtain sexual blackmail, with Kaufman asserting that her
husband possessed pictures of Hoover wearing women’s clothes and that those images
had been passed to Rosenstiel’s associate, mobster Meyer Lansky.“ Journalist and
author Anthony Summers has noted that, given Rosenstiel’s interest and ability to
have his residences and businesses bugged, “[Rosenstiel] was quite capable of having
the sex sessions at the Plaza bugged or arranging for Edgar to be photographed in his
female costumes” $$

In addition, New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Roy Cohn
for a case well after Kaufman's testimony, independently found evidence of the “blue
suite” at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local
government documents and information gathered by private detectives. It allegedly
involved minors as well as young men aged eighteen and older. Klotz later
summarized his findings, telling journalist and author Burton Hersh:

Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That’s where Cohn

got his power from — blackmail 2°

Further confirmation of Rosenstiel’s and Cohn’s activities in the “blue suite,” later
determined to be Suite 233, comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former
NYPD detective and ex-head of the department’s Human-Trafficking and Vice-
Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp - a
former Nebraska state senator who investigated the Franklin scandal of the 1980s —
that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting
politicians with minors during a sit-down interview with the former detective.

Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:

Cohn’s job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not
want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn

told me that himself $Z

Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that
Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-
communist crusade of the time.*8

The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein's recollection, stated that this sex blackmail ring
was part of the anti-communist crusade coupled with Hoover's involvement in these
“blue suite” events suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover's FBI,
may have been connected at a much broader level to the operation in a way that
transcended Hoover's own personal involvement.

Rothstein confirmed his statements to both DeCamp and Collins in an interview
with me that was conducted in early 2020. He additionally told me that Cohn had told
him that his role in this ring had originally come about because he himself had been
entrapped and blackmailed, leading Rothstein to feel some sort of sympathy for Cohn.

For those that may find it hard to believe that such an operation would take place
with the involvement of the FBI director, there are also other, related allegations to
consider — that American intelligence operatives and organized crime had competed
and then collaborated to blackmail Hoover years before Kaufman witnessed these
events at the Plaza hotel beginning in 1958.

Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay
situation,’ according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often
said of Hoover, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” Meyer Lansky’s widow also later claimed
that her husband had acquired “hard proof of Hoover's homosexuality and used it to

neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations”$2 The photos showed Hoover

engaged in sexual activity, specifically oral sex, with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy
Director Clyde Tolson.©2 There is considerable, separate evidence from the period that
the close, professional relationship between Hoover and Tolson was also intimate and
that this was an “open secret” in Washington.

At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief
James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials,
including John Weitz and Gordon Novel. Both Weitz and Novel later stated that the
pictures they had seen showed Hoover engaged in oral sex on a man who Angleton
identified as Tolson; however, only Hoover's face was recognizable in the
photographs. Angleton also claimed that the photos had been taken in 1946.4
Angleton was in charge of the CIA‘s relationship with the FBI as well as Israeli
intelligence until he left the agency in 1972. Angleton was also a CIA figure who had
pushed for the Agency to forge ties with Meyer Lansky, raising the possibility that
Angleton could have received the photo from Lansky.

However, Anthony Summers, in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar
Hoover, has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the
OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and either he, or another person at
the OSS or early CIA, had later shared them with Lansky. Summers also states that
“To [gangster Frank] Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians,
policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. The way they found to
deal with Hoover, according to several mob sources, involved his homo-sexuality.”

With the mobster associates of Rosenstiel being under significantly more pressure
during the 1950s, in large part thanks to the Kefauver Committee, it’s possible that
Hoover's appearances at The Plaza Hotel may have served as additional “insurance” for
these interests.

Hoover, for his part, was likely already used to the realities of being blackmailed by
this point, given that his private sex life had been known to the mob and US
intelligence community for years. He likely saw the opportunity to partake in the
scheme as a means of amassing his own, massive collection of blackmail. With thick
dossiers on friend and foe alike, Hoover’s office contained “secret files” on numerous
powerful people in Washington and beyond, files he used to gain favors and protect
his status as FBI director for as long as he wished. Even former OSS veterans like
Richard Helms have made such claims, alleging that Hoover “played ‘a very skillful
game’ with knowledge of the sexual habits of prominent people.”

Further evidence for this comes from journalist and author Burton Hersh who
alleges in his book Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J.
Edgar Hoover That Transformed America that Hoover had also been tied to Sherman

Kaminsky, who helped run a sexual blackmail operation in New York that involved
young male prostitutes.“ Kaminsky claimed to have been New York-bred, but federal
investigators later stated he was originally from Baltimore. Some reports claim
Kaminsky had ties to Israel, having served in the Israel Defense Forces.°8

The ring, which was called “The Chickens and the Bulls” by the NYPD, targeted
prominent men who were closeted homosexuals throughout the United States, many
of them married with families. Among those who had been blackmailed were a Navy
admiral, two generals, a US congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League
professor and well-known actors and television personalities.°2 That operation was
busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney
Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos showing
Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file. Kaminsky
successfully avoided arrest for 11 years, having “disappeared” from a New York
courthouse undetected during his sentencing hearing.“

Why would Hoover have been involved with the activities of Kaminsky? There are
only a few possibilities. One possibility is that Hoover had been blackmailed by
Kaminsky, though it’s more likely that Kaminsky instead had ties to figures in
organized crime that had already blackmailed Hoover long before. Another possibility
is that Hoover was cozy to a second sexual blackmail operation targeting closeted
homosexual men because he sought to pad his own library of blackmail for personal
and professional gain.

What does seem clear is that Hoover was well aware of the power that amassing
blackmail afforded and was willing to indulge in taboo behavior at the “blue suite”
because he was no longer concerned about being extorted or manipulated with sexual
blackmail in ways that would end his career or destroy his public image. He had fallen
in with the very crowd that had reportedly blackmailed him, later developing a
symbiotic relationship with that same network.

The most obvious, and troubling, symptom of this symbiosis was Hoover's
reluctance to tackle organized crime as FBI director. Hoover repeatedly declined to
use the Bureau to target organized crime networks, referring to organized crime as a
“local” problem in which the FBI did not need to intervene for most of his nearly fifty
year stint as the top law enforcement administrator in the country.”

According to congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno, Hoover’s apparent
aversion to targeting organized crime networks, such as those in which Rosenstiel and
Lansky figured prominently, “allowed organized crime to grow very strong in
economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing

of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner.”

BUSINESS AS USUAL

(Qie aspects of Hoover’s symbiotic relationship with these organized crime-

tinged networks can also be seen in Hoover's ties to Rosenstiel, and Rosenstiel’s
close associate Roy Cohn, in the “above-board” worlds of “legitimate” business and
politics.

Most records place the beginning of Hoover’s relationship with Rosenstiel as
occurring in the 1950s, the same decade that that Hoover was allegedly attending
Rosenstiel’s blackmail parties. Rosenstiel’s FBI file, obtained by Anthony Summers,
cites the first Rosenstiel meeting as taking place in 1956.4 After requesting that
meeting, Rosenstiel was granted a personal face-to-face meeting with the director in a
matter of hours, a rare feat. However, Summers notes that there is evidence that the
two men had met much earlier, as Hoover was on record showing an unusual concern
in the FBI’s handling of Rosenstiel’s criminal links as early as 1939.4

The “blue suite” parties and blackmail may also explain the uncharacteristic ease
with which a young Roy Cohn was able to meet with J. Edgar Hoover upon his arrival
as a young man in Washington DC in 1952, an event that has puzzled Cohn’s
biographers. Roy Cohn’s account of how he was able to meet Hoover in person,
deemed “improbable” by Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, involves Hoover
calling Cohn after the latter had unsuccessfully sought to go through the normal
channels to communicate with the FBI Director. Cohn, only in his mid-20s, had
been seeking Hoover's aid in gathering support for a controversial presentment, which
alleged communist subversion among United Nations staff.

Hoover, who is supposed to be talking to Cohn for the first time per “official”
accounts, is alleged to have said “Roy, are you trying to see me?” To that, Cohn
claimed to have responded “You're darn right I’m trying to see you. It’s been rather
difficult.” Hoover then offered, “Whenever you want to see me, you just pick up the
phone and ask for me and you'll be able to see me.’ “Well, when can I see you?” Cohn
had asked, with the director then saying, “Come on over.’ Per Cohn, he was then
seated in front of Hoover within ten minutes. Von Hoffman, who notes elsewhere in
his Cohn biography that some of Cohn’s unlikely stories “do turn out to be true,’ notes
that the story is improbable, in part, because the only tie he could find between Cohn
and Hoover at the time was a connection to George Sokolsky, the director of the
American Jewish League Against Communism.

Also unlikely, per Von Hoffman, was Hoover’s alleged urging to Roy that “When
you want to see me, call me directly. Don’t go through channels ... [The Justice
Department] is monitoring your calls at your own office across the way.’ Von Hoffman

states that this degree of frankness “with a junior whom he had only recently met” is at
odds with Hoover's reputation “as one of the most adept of mountain goats in
negotiating the trails and passes of the federal bureaucracy.’ Von Hoffman asks,
“Would merely sharing a political outlook on the dangers of communism be enough
to seduce Hoover, who was never indiscreet, into such indiscretions as advising Roy,
all else failing, to threaten to quit and back it up by calling a press conference if there
were no other way to shake the presentment loose?”

Von Hoffman concludes that Cohn’s story was inaccurate, though he notes that
“Roy's account of what Hoover told him is a story that somebody with a dangerous
secret to hide might tell” Z However, in the context of the “blue suite” parties at the
Plaza hotel, it’s certainly possible that both Cohn’s account of his first “official”
meeting with Hoover and his harboring of “a dangerous secret” are both true. This is
supported from press reports of the same period that claim that, soon after “Cohn
caught Hoover's eye” in Washington DC, Hoover “showered Cohn with compliments
and notes and photographs.’ Author Burton Hersh similarly asserts that, soon after
meeting, Hoover and Cohn “traded favors, effusive compliments, gifts and elaborate
private dinners. It quickly became ‘Roy’ and ‘Edgar.’

The “official” story also holds that the only bond initially shared between
Rosenstiel and Cohn, as it is alleged with Hoover and Cohn, was a shared
commitment to anti-communism, which has similarly left biographers and observers
of their relationship puzzled by “improbable” anecdotes similar to that described
above. Yet, in an era where the Red Scare raged alongside the so-called Lavender Scare
(which targeted homosexuals with the same fervor as the Red Scare targeted
communists), the bonds forged between a group of men who shared their forbidden
passions in a milieu of secretive orgies, blackmail, and organized crime, would have
fostered a much stronger sense of camaraderie.

The surprising closeness shared among Rosenstiel, Cohn and Hoover can be seen
in other arrangements. For instance, soon after meeting Hoover “officially” for the first
time in 1956, Hoover sent Rosenstiel flowers when the latter fell ill. A year later,
Rosenstiel was heard telling Hoover “Your wish is my command” during a meeting.
That same year, Louis B. Nichols, Hoover’s “Number 2” at the Bureau for decades, was
hired to become executive vice president of Rosenstiel’s empire of Schenley. Around
this time, it was reported that Rosenstiel had “bought large quantities of books about
Hoover and distributed them as gifts} In addition, Rosenstiel had also bought no
less than 25,000 copies of Masters of Deceit, a book written by Hoover about how to
fight communism in the United States, which he sent “to schools around the

country? $2

A few years later, in 1965, Nichols incorporated the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation.
Rosenstiel was the principal contributor, giving the foundation 1000 shares of
Schenley stock. Nichols also gave a smaller, yet unknown amount of Schenley shares
to the foundation, while the American Jewish League Against Communism, of which
Roy Cohn was now president, gave $500 to help start the foundation. A year later, the
Dorothy H. and Lewis Rosenstiel Foundation gave $50,000 to the foundation. In
1968, the Rosenstiel Foundation gave an additional $1 million to the foundation that
was made in the form of bonds of the Glen Alden Corporation, which took over
Schenley industries that same year. A 1969 report in the Washington Post later noted
that “nearly everyone directly associated with Nichols in the Hoover Foundation is or
was connected with either the FBI or Schenleys. The report also noted that, despite
lofty promises regarding the foundation's activities, it spent hardly any money at the
time the Washington Post’s report was published in 1969, suggesting that something
about the foundation’s activities during that period was odd.

Around this same period, Rosenstiel began to retire, selling his controlling interest
to Glen Alden in 1968 and resigning as chairman and CEO of Schenley. While it
seemed that Cohn would serve as Rosenstiel’s successor in matters of blackmail, it
seems another man served as his successor in matters of business. Per Rosenstiel’s New
York Times obituary, around the time he sold his control of Schenley to Glen Alden
and retired, he also sold his Manhattan town house, bugged for blackmail, to Israeli-
American businessman Meshulam Riklis.®* Riklis was then an “influential figure” at
Glen Alden, whose rise had been regarded with skepticism by Wall Street and the
press. Indeed, Riklis had absorbed so many companies, including Glen
Alden/Schenley in 1972, into his Rapid-American Corporation that he was forced to
defend himself publicly, insisting that the fuel for his corporate takeovers involved “no

mystery money, no un-named associates, no Swiss-bank money.”®=

Endnotes

20

21
22

23

Peter C. Newman, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1978), 66-68.

Michael R. Marrus, Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram's Mr. Sam (Hanover:
Published by University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press, 1991), 15.
Marrus, Samuel Bronfman, 22.

Nicholas Faith, The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram, 1st ed (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 2006), 217-18.

Eli Yahri, “Seagram | The Canadian Encyclopedia,’ February 13, 2012,

Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (Mississauga, Ont: Wiley,
2009), 199.

Richard Allen, “Social Gospel | The Canadian Encyclopedia,’ February 7, 2006,

Hillis, and Margaret Sanche, “The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan | Details,’ n.d.
https://esask.uregina.ca/entry/religion,jsp.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 28.

John M. Bumsted, The Peoples of Canada, Fourth edition (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 218-19.

Newman, Bronfman Dynasty, 74.

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, First Scribner hardcover ed (New
York: Scribner, 2010), chap. 10.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 34-5.

Marrus, Samuel Bronfman, 68.

Schneider, Iced, 200.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 34-5.

Okrent, Last Call, chap. 12.

Jesse Donaldson, “On BC Day, a Look at Five Wacky Stories from the Province’s Past,’ The

Stories/.
Okrent, Last Call, chap. 11.
Davin de Kergommeaux, “Whisky Heroes: Sam Bronfman, Seagram | Scotch Whisky,” March

seagram/.

James W. Muller, “Two Churchills and the Hudson’s Bay Company,’ APSA 2009 Toronto
Meeting Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 3, 2009),
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1451764.

Okrent, Last Call, chap. 12.

Thomas Maier, “Prohibition and Profit: The Secret Kennedy-Churchill-Roosevelt Deals,’ TIME,
October 21, 2014, https://time.com/3529756/kennedy-churchill-roosevelt-investment-deal/.
Faith, The Bronfmans, 132. Note on Robertson's death. Source: Faith. Page 132?

24
25
26
27

28
29
30

31
32

33
34
35

36

37
38
39
40
41
42
43

44
45
46
47

48
49
50
51
52
53
54

Schneider, Iced, 203.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 64.

Okrent, Last Call, chap. 12.

Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Hearings before the Special
Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (1950, 1951), p. 544,
https://archive.org/details/investigationofo07unit/page/544/mode/2up.

Schneider, Iced, 199.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 65.

Martin Mayer, “The Volatile Business,” Esquire, August 1959,
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1959/8/1/the-volatile-business.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 65.

Leonard Sloane, “Lewis Rosenstiel, Founder Of Schenley Empire, Dies,” New York Times,
January 22, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/22/archives/lewis-rosenstiel-founder-
of-schenley-empire-dies.html.

Sloane, Lewis Rosenstiel Dies.

Sloane, Lewis Rosenstiel Dies.

Nicholas Gage, “Ex-Head of Schenley Industries Is Linked to Crime ‘Consortium,” New York
Times, February 19, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/02/19/archives/exhead-of-
schenley-industries-is-linked-to-crime-consortium.html.

Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York:
Pocket Star Books, 1994), 285, https://archive.org/details/officialconfideO00summ.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 287.
Faith, The Bronfmans, 98-99.

Mayer, The Volatile Business.

Faith, The Bronfmans, 64.

Mayer, The Volatile Business.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 297.

M.A. Jones, “Potential Criminal Informant (PCI) Sue Young, Hollywood, Calif., Call Girl”
(Archives.gov, July 26, 1960), https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-
32304320.pdf.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 291.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 292.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 292.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, “I Was Groped by a Man Called ‘Mary’: The World Changes but Not the
Catholic Church,’ Salon, February 9, 2019, https://www.salon.com/2019/02/09/i-was-

Summers, Official and Confidential, 293.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 293.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 294.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 515.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 515.
Summers, Official and Confidential 516.
Michael Newton, The Mafia at Apalachin, 1957 (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2012), 117.

55
56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63
64

65
66

67
68

69
70
71

72
73
74
75
76
77

Summers, Official and Confidential, 297.

Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-off between the Kennedys and J. Edgar
Hoover That Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 88.

John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska
(Lincoln, Neb: AWT, 1992), 179.

Terry Melanson, “The Ghost of Roy Cohn - Conspiracy Archive,’ August 24, 2014,

Jerome A. Kroth, Conspiracy in Camelot: The Complete History of the Assassination of John
Fitzgerald Kennedy (New York: Algora Pub, 2003), 233, https://books.google.cl/books?
id=VStz _I0QcBOC.

“New Book Pictures J. Edgar Hoover as Drag Queen,” UPI, February 6, 1993,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/02/06/New-book-pictures-J-Edgar-Hoover-as-drag-
queen/1064728974800/.

Many of the key pieces of evidence for Hoover's relationship with Tolson, as well as Hoover's
closeted homosexuality, can be found in this article published by the UK’s The Guardian:
Anthony Summers, “The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover,’ The Guardian, December 31, 2011,
“J. Edgar Hoover Was Homosexual, Blackmailed by Mob, Book Says,” Los Angeles Times,
February 6, 1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-06-mn-1078-
story.html.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 280.

Jerome A. Kroth, Conspiracy in Camelot: The Complete History of the Assassination of John
Fitzgerald Kennedy (New York: Algora Pub, 2003), 233.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 276.

Mark Riebling, Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War Between the FBI and CIA
Has Endangered National Security, 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002,
n.d.), 131.

Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 88.

William McGowan, “The Chickens and the Bulls,’ Slate, July 11, 2012,
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/the-chickens-and-the-bulls-the-rise-and-
incredible-fall-of-a-vicious-extortion-ring-that-preyed-on-prominent-gay-men-in-the-
1960s.html.

McGowan, “The Chickens and the Bulls.”

Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 88.

Ronald Smothers, “Seize 11-Year Fugitive in Homosexual Blackmail Case,’ New York Times,

homo-sexual-blackmail-case.html.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 517.

Summers, OOfficial and Confidential, 517.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 516.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 516.

Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 123-24.
Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 123-125.

78

79
80
81
82
83
84
85

Maxine Cheshire, “The Director,’ Washington Post, 1969,

%20J%20Edgar%20Foundation/Item%2005.pdf.
Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 133-134.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 516.
Cheshire, “The Director.’

Summers, Official and Confidential, 289.
Cheshire, “The Director.’

Sloane, Lewis Rosenstiel Dies.

“CORPORATIONS: The Rapid Riser - TIME,’ June 6, 1960,
https://web.archive.org/web/20111007012745/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl
e/0,9171,874162-1,00.html.

CHAPTER 3

ORGANIZED CRIME
AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL

STATE-BUILDING

EF its July, 1971 obituary for Samuel Bronfman, the New York Times wrote that,
after World War II, the liquor baron had “helped finance a secret purchase of

?1 Additional details on Bronfman’s

Canadian weapons for troops of the Haganah
role in that purchase, beyond its brief mention by the Times, are rather difficult to
come by. Peter Newman, in his otherwise exhaustive The Bronfman Dynasty,
writes that Sam “personally underwrote life insurance policies for Canadian pilots
recruited to help Israel fight its 1948 war of independence”? However, it is also
known that, a few years after Israel’s creation, in 1951, Bronfman would play a
leading role in a similar, “secret purchase” for the Haganah’s successor, the Israel
Defense Force (IDF). In that case, Bronfman specifically answered the call of
Israel's Shimon Peres, taking Peres to Ottawa, Canada to negotiate the transfer for
$2 million worth of weapons to Israel. Bronfman then raised funds to cover the
entire cost of the sizable arms cache.4

Yet, aside from that little is known of his earlier role in arming Zionist
paramilitaries prior to Israel's founding. As Newman noted, Bronfman preferred
to remain tight-lipped on “Zionist matters,’ despite his position as head of the
Canadian Jewish Congress - an example of the family’s characteristic “quiet
manipulation.” Regardless of the exact nature of Bronfman’s activities in this area,
his connection to the Haganah was not unique for those in his social circles. Yet,
even outside of Bronfman’s contacts, efforts to aid the Zionist paramilitary group,
which would later form the backbone of the IDF, were already indicative of a
wider tendency in pro-Zionist activism that swept across Canada, America, Latin
America and beyond during the late 1940s.

What was at stake was the creation of Israel itself, as a sovereign political
entity independent of the British, who, until 1948, had controlled Mandatory
Palestine in accordance with treaties set up at the end of World War I. When the
British Mandate ended in May 1958, Israel declared itself independent, and
immediately entered into conflict with the Palestinians and a coalition of Arab
forces. Those fighting to create Israel were able to assert themselves so forcefully
largely because of the careful groundwork that had been laid out in advance by a
number of individuals and groups, many of them working in the shadows.

Such was the historical mission of the Haganah (“Defense”), an organized
Zionist paramilitary network that had been set up by the Jewish Agency - an
activist branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The Jewish Agency,
under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, oversaw the creation of numerous
towns, villages, communal outposts and defense groups in Mandatory Palestine.
The Jewish Agency would later atrophy, only to be relaunched by one of Leslie
Wexner’s mentors, Max Fisher, in 1970.

The formation of the Haganah in 1920 was a major step forward towards the
formation of the Israeli state. Vital to its functioning was the training and arms
provided by the British military. Major General Orde Charles Wingate, who had
been dispatched to help administer British control over the territories, worked
closely with the Haganah. Wingate even organized joint British Army-Zionist
paramilitary commando units dedicated to patrolling and suppressing Arab
elements in the region. These were called the Special Night Squads.

In 1945, the Haganah began its effort to stockpile weapons, ammunition,
aircraft, non-lethal supplies, and machine tools sourced from around the globe. In
the US, Ben-Gurion reached out to a close associate, Zionist activist Rudolf
Sonneborn, who had traveled to Palestine years earlier to survey the construction
of Jewish villages on behalf of the World Zionist Organization. Under the
leadership of Sonneborn, eighteen or so Jewish millionaires and billionaires were
recruited into bankrolling the supply effort. Thus, the Sonneborn Institute, as it
was known, was born.

The Institute, an activist collaboration of Zionist millionaires and billionaires
that pursued specific, Zionism-related causes, would later serve as sort of a model
for the “Mega Group,’ founded years later by Leslie Wexner and Charles
Bronfman in 1991. The Sonneborn Institute’s chief asset was a Haganah operative
named Yehuda Arazi. During World War II, he served as a soldier in the Jewish

Brigade, a British army unit that recruited its fighters from the immigrant
populations living in Mandatory Palestine. By 1945, he was an old hand at gun-
running. Indeed, Arazi “had been active smuggling arms for the Haganah into

Palestine from Europe since 1938.”2

Through these efforts, he developed an
impressive roster of contacts, many of whom were tapped to set up front
companies through which the Sonneborn Institute and the Haganah could carry

out their activities. Ricky-Dale Calhoun wrote that:

[One] Arazi associate was Leonard Weisman, who was probably a member of the Sonneborn
group. Weisman was a 34-year-old from Pittsburgh who had made a fortune in scrap metals and
construction materials. His businesses included Materials Redistribution Company, a firm that
dealt in scrap machinery; Paragon Design and Development Corporation, a company that
traded in building materials; and Pratt Steamship Lines. A fourth Weisman company, Foundry
Associates, Inc., existed only on paper. All assisted in the purchase and illegal export of arms

from the United States”

Other front companies were organized by Nahum Bernstein, an attorney in
New York City, that were used to source weapons and/or construct them from
spare parts, and then export them overseas. Bernstein’s name can be found on the
corporate registrations of firms like Machinery Processing and Converting
Company, which “provided cover for the purchase and illegal export of arms-
making machines as well as armaments, and Oved Trading Company, which
supplied “legal cover for buying and transporting explosives.”2

There was also a trio of interlaced companies: Materials for Palestine, Inland
Machinery and Metal Company, and the Eastern Development Company.
Materials for Palestine was a charity through which money could be raised, while
Inland Machinery actively shipped armaments and lethal munitions. Eastern
Development, meanwhile, “exported legal nonmilitary goods and machinery to
Palestine as relief supplies.” There is a possibility that Paul Helliwell, discussed in
Chapter 1, had some connection to this company, as he was listed as the attorney
for the similarly named Eastern Development Corporation. According to a 1951
article in the Miami News, this Eastern Development was doing business in
Florida, but had been formed in Pittsburgh. As mentioned above, Leonard
Weisman, the probable Sonneborn group member who worked with Arazi to
create fronts for arms exporting, was also from Pittsburgh.

The potential presence of Helliwell in this mesh leads naturally to another
question: was organized crime also involved in these efforts? Unlike the mysteries
around Eastern Development, the role of organized crime in covertly arming the

Haganah is well-documented. As these un-official arms trade networks spread
across the US, gangsters and mobsters — many of whom actively identified with
the Zionist cause — threw their hats into the ring. Early on, Arazi forged ties with
Meyer Lansky, requesting aid in maritime transit for the arms. Lansky, in turn,
contacted two of his associates who controlled New York City’s docks and the
long-shoremen’s union, Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis. The trio then “helped
Israeli agents conceal the arms purchased for Israel, while arms bound for Egypt
mysteriously fell overboard”? Lansky’s close associate, Bugsy Siegel, met with
Reuven Dafne, a representative of the Haganah looking to raise funds. Dafne, as
the story goes, told Siegel that the Zionists were looking to unshackle themselves
from British rule and that the path to do this was to fight. Siegel told Dafne “I’m
with you,” and for several weeks afterwards, the Haganah would receive suitcases
“filled with $5 and $10 dollar bills — $50,000 in all.”12

Besides Lansky, one of the more active mobsters in the flow of arms was
Joseph “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli. According to files obtained from the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics, Zicarelli was “alleged to have been involved in the traffic of
arms and munitions sold to the government of Israel.” It was one of many
destinations for Zicarelli’s arms: he also brokered arms sales to Cuba, Mexico,
Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The latter, as will be
discussed shortly, was also active in the acquisition of arms for Israel. Zicarelli was
close to Carmine Galante, a key player in the Bonanno mafia family, who would
later become one of Roy Cohn’s main clients from the criminal underworld.
Allegedly, Zicarelli had been the subject of a feud between Charles Tourine of the
Genovese family and Galante, with each wanting to recruit him into their crime
family. Galante won out, and it was under his watch that Zicarelli’s lucrative
arms trade flourished. At one point in the 1950s, Zicarelli was dispatched to
Montreal by Galante to work with the Canadian mobster Vincenzo Cotroni.
Together, Zicarelli and Cotroni organized the import of large sums of heroin into
the country, as part of the Canadian wing of the French Connection.

Zicarelli was also alleged to be a close business associate of Lewis Rosenstiel.
Rosenstiel’s fourth wife Susan Kaufman testified that Zicarelli had been a secret
partner New Jersey warehouses owned by Schenley Industries, Rosenstiel’s
company. She furthered alleged that Rosenstiel had meetings with Zicarelli and
Meyer Lansky.+ The connection to Schenley signals Zicarelli’s penchant for
involving himself in quasi-legitimate businesses that acted as both “above-board”

profit-turners and as fronts for less-than-reputable activities. Another one of these
businesses was ABCO Vending, a cigarette vending machine company that was
controlled by Zicarelli and Galante. Joining them there was Irwin “Steve”
Schwartz, who later became infamous in the 1970s for his involvement in costly
stock manipulation schemes. FBN files describe Schwartz as representing “the
Galante-Zicarelli interests in the arms traffic, promotion and sale of worthless
stocks and securities, and the cigarette vending business,’ before adding that
“Since 1946 Schwartz has been engaged in the traffic of arms, a good portion of
which have been obtained from Communist Bloc nations and shipped first to
Israel and later to Cuba. Associated with Schwartz in these ventures were Irving
Schindler and Adolf Schwimmer.’ 4

Adolph “Al” Schwimmer was the founder of Israel Aircraft Industries, one of
the country’s great military contractors known today as Israel Aerospace
Industries (IAI). During the 1930s, he worked for Lockheed and TWA, and, after
World War II broke out, he was affiliated in some capacity with the US Air
Transport Command. Schwimmer would remain active down through the
decades, with a tendency to crop up in various Cold War-era covert operations.
Perhaps most notoriously, he emerged as a key player on the Israeli side of the
Iran-Contra Affair, and by some accounts was the individual who conceived of the
“arms-for-hostages” plot at the center of Oliver North’s complicated web. As for
IAI, it would become owned, years later, by Israel’s richest man Shaul Eisenberg.
Under Eisenberg, LAI would have close ties to Israeli intelligence, from which he
drew most of the company’s senior staff.+®

In his work securing materials for the Haganah, Schwimmer worked closely
with Irvin “Swifty” Schindler. Schindler owned an airfreight company called
Service Air, which Schwimmer relocated to California with funds from the
Haganah. Together, Schwimmer and Schindler utilized the company as a means of
acquiring aircraft and aircraft parts to be shipped to Palestine. Yet, with an
embargo in place due to President Truman's declaration of neutrality, Service Air
was prohibited from sending them overseas. Schwimmer and Schindler, aided by
Arazi, turned to the Haganah’s contacts in Panama. Soon, “legal ownership of the
airplanes was transferred to the newly established Panamanian national airline
LAPSA, allowing the aircraft to be legally flown to Panama” and from there they
were moved abroad.+®

In Chapter 7, which details the Iran-Contra Affair, Israel's close-knit
relationship with Panama is mentioned in greater detail. Yet, the origins of this
relationship began here, with the efforts of the Haganah to arm Zionist forces in
Palestine following World War II. It wasn't, however, the only country in that
region to have similar connections to Israel. Many of the people discussed in this
chapter, like Bayonne Joe Zicarelli, were actively working with anti-communist
forces in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and elsewhere at the same time that they
were working with the Haganah. One particularly important anti-communist
force that was collaborating with the Haganah was the Somoza regime in
Nicaragua.

The special relationship between the Zionist cause and Somoza’s Nicaragua
was largely due to the heavy presence of United Fruit, the New York-Boston
banana trading company whose influence in Latin America was to be
fundamentally intertwined with the CIA’s activities in the region.“ In 1933,
United Fruit had fallen under the control of Samuel Zemurray, whose Cuyamael
Fruit Company - a favorite of top Wall Street firms like Lehman and Goldman
Sachs — had merged with the company several years prior. Zemurray, during the
1940s, was a big backer of Zionist causes. He aided the supply of arms to the
Haganah, and reportedly helped the organization acquire the SS Exodus, a
steamship used to ferry refuges to Palestine, in 1946. United Fruit, which later
became United Brands, is discussed throughout this book due to its persisting
intelligence connections as well as the fact its main leadership later included
members of Leslie Wexner’s inner circle and his two main mentors, Max Fisher
and A. Alfred Taubman.

By 1947, as Trumans embargo began to be enforced, Nicaragua started
providing arms to the Haganah. Somoza reportedly profited directly from this
venture: he “received 3.5. percent commission on all arms purchases made by the
Haganah under Nicaraguan aegis”!8 A decade later, Israel returned the favor when
Shimon Peres negotiated an arms deal with Somoza that transformed Israel's
emergent military-industrial complex into the primary supplier of weapons for
Nicaragua.’? As will be discussed in Chapter 7, Israel was active in arming and
training the Nicaraguan Contras, the US-backed paramilitary forces that opposed
the Sandinista government, which had toppled the Somoza regime in the late
1970s. The entry of Israel into this conflict was guaranteed by this precise history

— and the Reagan administration, as part of its propaganda campaign, was quick to
paint the new, Sandinista-led government as violently anti-Semitic.

The relationship between the Haganah and Latin America wasn't solely
dependent upon the graces of Zemurray and United Fruit. Reportedly, Haganah
officers called upon the services of Sam Kay, a Florida businessman and real estate
developer, who had extensive contacts in Panama, Batistas Cuba, and elsewhere.
FBI files describe Kay as a “reputed international gangster,” and one of his close
business associates was the Miami Beach hotel impresario Morris Lansburgh, who
was himself a frontman for Meyer Lansky. Kay would later be linked to Florida
mob boss Santo Trafficante, though the two were purported to have had a falling
out that would almost cost Kay his life.

It was at this point where the Zionist interests melded with organized crime’s
real estate ventures, casino operations, and slush funds at the door of the
Caribbean. Soon, these connections would truly begin to sprawl outwards and
become truly intercontinental in scope.

THE HOT MONEY WEB

“Ders the Second World War,” writes Jim Hougan, Tibor Rosenbaum

“became a hero for the resistance through his activities on behalf of the
Jews. Using ‘Istvan Lukacs’ as a nom de guerre, he carried out a series of Mission
Impossible rescues. In one instance he posed as a high-ranking Nazi officer,
entered a concentration camp, and under ‘administrative pretext’ obtained the
release of thirty doomed prisoners”??? His subsequent activities, however, were
less than heroic.

With high-level connections secured through his position as a delegate for the
World Zionist Congress, Rosenbaum set up his Geneva bank, International Credit
Bank (ICB). ICB regularly moved money for Mossad and for Israel’s Ministry of
Defense. The British Sunday Times later reported in 1975 that “as much as [90%]
of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s external budget flowed ... through Rosenbaum’s
bank% It also moved money for organized crime. In 1967, an expose in LIFE
magazine fingered ICB as the recipient of large sums of money skimmed off by the
mob from the casinos they owned in Las Vegas, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

Overseeing the complex chains of inter-bank relations and transfer chains that
enabled this “hot money” to flow around the globe was a series of banking

institutions controlled by Meyer Lansky frontmen. The set-up was essentially as
follows: casino skim (as well as profits generated by the drug trade and other
organized crime rackets) was moved into two key offshore banks, the Bank of
World Commerce (BWC) and Atlas Bank, the latter of which was a subsidiary of
Rosenbaum’s ICB. The funds would then be moved to accounts held by ICB in
Geneva, where they would be converted into loans and investments to complete
the money laundering loop. As will be discussed shortly, some of these funds may
have been used to finance real estate investments that were made by people
connected to American and Israeli intelligence.

The organizer of Atlas, on behalf of ICB, was Sylvain Ferdmann. The expose in
LIFE described Ferdmann as a “Swiss citizen who is an international banker and
economist,’ before adding that “US authorities have marked Ferdmann a fugitive

. accused of interfering with the federal inquiry into the skimming racket”?
Working alongside Ferdmann and Rosenbaum was a coterie of Lansky’s closest
allies. Sitting on the board of ICB itself was Ed Levinson and John Pullman.
Levinson, who was partnered with Lansky in the Miami International Airport
Hotel, ran the “mob-controlled Fremont Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas”? Levinson
was also tight with Clifford Jones, the lieutenant governor of Nevada between
1947 and 1954 who was also an alleged associate of Meyer Lansky.”

Sitting alongside Levinson on the ICB board was John Pullman, Lansky’s
personal financial advisor. Pullman was also close to Lou Chesler, having
becoming acquainted with the Canadian businessman in the 1940s. He
subsequently introduced Chesler into Lanksy’s orbit. Soon, Chesler began
managing Lansky’s interests in the Bahamas - including the development of
hotels and casinos. At the same time, Pullman was organizing the Bank of World
Commerce, the partner bank to Atlas Bank and correspondent bank to ICB.

Levinson and Pullman also sat on the board of BWC. An IRS report aptly
described this bank as having been set up to maintain “a liquid supply of funds to
be used for setting up new gambling casinos in the Caribbean wherever and
whenever the opportunity presents itself.’”2° They were joined on the board by
Benjamin Siegelbaum, a money courier for Lansky and a prominent figure in
organized crime circles in his own right. Besides BWC, Siegelbaum held posts at
the Exchange and Investment Bank, a sort of Geneva-based counterpart bank to
Rosenbaum’s ICB. R.T. Naylor, in his book Hot Money and the Politics of Debt,
writes that, for a time, Exchange and Investment Bank was Lansky’s preferred

financial institution — at least until his role in the bank was accidentally exposed by
Chase Manhattan. This occurred after the bank found two of their employees
using accounts there to spirit away embezzled funds. It was at this point that
Lansky shifted the bulk of his business to Rosenbaum’s bank.

Aside from Geneva banking, Siegelbaum also dabbled in Florida real estate.
His money backed one of the state’s large landowners, Major Realty, which had
been co-founded in part by a Florida entrepreneur named Max Orovitz. Orovitz
was, as Jonathan Marshall points out, “a legitimate businessman and an honored
Jewish philanthropist, but no stranger to criminals”? He was partnered with Lou
Chesler in both Florida real estate (albeit via Chesler’s General Development
Company, not Major Realty) and in development projects in the Bahamas that
ultimately spawned Resorts International, which was previously Mary Carter
Paint and had been linked to both the mob, to former New York governor Thomas
Dewey and to Paul Helliwell’s Castle Bank.

Orovitz was part of what was known as the “Miami Group” - a circle of
organized crime-linked Jewish businessmen with holdings across various
economic sectors in Florida and in Israel. Members of the Miami Group
established Dan Hotels, a luxury hotel chain with locations in Israel and India, and
also set up “Israel’s first successful oil drilling company, Israel Oil Ventures.”28
Israel Oil Ventures expanded its capacities considerably in 1960, when it
purchased Israel-American Oil Corp — an oil venture that was intimately tied to
organized crime via its holding in another oil firm, Rimrock Tidelands. A
subsidiary of Rimrock Tidelands, Rimrock International, was of interest to a
Senate investigation into “international narcotics traffic.” This was because
Rimrock International's managing director was Santo Sorge, who was described in
the Senate report as “one of the most important Mafia leaders” and a liaison
between American and Sicilian mafia clans.”2

Compared to its fellow dark money conduits, Atlas Bank — later renamed the
“Atlas Trust” — is something of a mystery. It not only sat at the intersection of
Geneva-bound money flows, but was also tied to hot money from the Middle
East. According to Alan Block, Atlas “was united in some shadowy way with Intra
Bank in Beirut, Lebanon,’ which maintained its own offshore entity in the
Bahamas called Intra Bahamas Trust Ltd.22

Intra Bank was formed in 1951 by Yousef Beidas, a Christian Palestinian
refugee who had been born into a prominent banking family. Just over a decade

later, what began as a modest operation ballooned into a sprawling empire, at
which point Beidas forged agreements with leading American banks. These
included Bank of America and Chase Manhattan, and Beidas then placed
branches of Intra Bank in the world’s important hotspots for hot money: London,
Geneva, and the Caribbean. At home, in Lebanon, Intra held “20% of the
country’s total deposits” and “56[%] of all the country’s banking assets”% There
was also a deep relationship between Intra Bank and illicit activities of all types.
As Jonathan Marshall notes:

Smugglers of all sorts availed themselves of Intra Bank’s services. It was a prime depository for
many of the world’s leading arms traffickers, who received financing from Lebanese traders for
illegal weapons sales in the Southern Arabian peninsula (Yemen and Aden), Cyprus, Sudan,
Nigeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kurdish communities in the Middle East. Wealthy Arabs
with too many petrodollars on their hands, looking for a savvy bank in the region to look after
their wealth, fattened its deposits further.... Lebanon was prized as a “haven for cash for
anybody with a balance to hide — U.S. tax evaders, oil-rich sheiks who want to lay something by
for the rainy day of revolution, and assorted racketeers and purveyors of stolen or smuggled

wealth from all over the world,’ observed LIFE magazine in 1967.22

Naturally, this sort of environment made Intra Bank an attractive financial
institution for the CIA, and the bank helped transform Beirut into a core hub for
the Agency’s covert operations in the Middle East. Marshall reports that Beidas in
particular had a “personal touch” when it came to dealing with the CIA — he was
even seen “taking CIA officers into his private office to handle their checks.”*4
Sitting on the board of directors of Intra Bank was Kamal Adham, the head of
Saudi intelligence and a cousin of the infamous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi — a
later key player in Iran-Contra, the BCCI affair, and numerous other covert
activities. According to the Congressional BCCI Report, Adnan “was the CIA’s
principle liaison for the entire Middle East from the mid-1960s through 1979734

Intra Bank was identified by American law enforcement as being a major
laundromat and source of funding for the global drug trade, a sizable portion of
which was based in Lebanon. This was thanks to the country’s position as a key
node in the famed French Connection, as Lebanon was a major source of hashish,
raw opium, and even refined heroin that was destined for black markets in Europe
and North America.

This node of the international drug trade was largely controlled by Sami
Khoury and his partner, Omar Makkouk. They had forged close ties to the
Lebanese political establishment and law enforcement community, generating an

atmosphere of generalized corruption that gained Khoury the nickname of “the
Untouchable.” Khoury’s ties soon expanded overseas. According to a CIA report,
Corsican organized crime figures allied with Khoury had made inroads into “the
highest levels of French government, industry and society, including the cabinet,
police, and military.”2=

Khoury also enjoyed protection from Israel. James Attie, an agent of the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) assigned to the Middle East, reported that the
drug lord had provided thousands of guns to Israel, and that the country had
“provided the contacts and money that enabled Khoury to move narcotics across
Europe”3ć Intriguingly, another figure implicated by the FBN in the flow of drugs
from Lebanon to Europe was the banker Edmond Safra, whose connection to
BCCI, Iran-Contra, and figures like Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein is
discussed in Chapter 7.24 Safra was also a Zionist with strong ties to Israel. For
instance, during the 1980s, he served on the board of overseers of B'nai Brith
International, seated alongside figures like Edgar M. Bronfman and Max Fisher.

One of Intra Bank’s most lucrative holdings was the Casino du Liban, a
gambling establishment outside of Beirut. The casino was a hot-spot for the
international jet-set as well as a meeting place for various figures from the
underworld who regularly rubbed shoulders with elites. According to Jonathan
Marshall, the Casino du Liban “was a favorite playground for Saudi sheiks and
rich Arab businessmen, such as Adnan Khashoggi.... It was also a favorite
gathering place for foreign businessmen, diplomats and spies.’*® Jim Hougan,
meanwhile, writes that the casino, at its height, was “said to be the biggest
gambling emporium in the world — dwarfing the Sands, the Dunes, the Flamingo,
and Monte Carlo.”

At the Casino du Liban, gambling concessions were held by Marcel Francisci,
the leader of the Corsican underworld. In the 1940s, Francisci allied himself with
Sami Khoury, and, prior to his murder in 1968, he forged a close working
relationship between French and Italian gangsters. “Mr. Heroin,’ as he was known
by American authorities, “was the man with the international perspective.” As a
result of his other connections to Francisci and others, Khoury did perhaps more
than anyone to maintain the French connection drug pipeline.*2 Francisci was
also a partner with Meyer Lansky, who was likewise known to haunt the Casino

du Liban from time to time.

Intra Bank’s peculiarities make a little more sense when one considers that, for
bankers and organized criminals alike, there is often money to be made on both
sides of any given conflict. After all, this was a bank that had been founded by
someone who had fled the Haganah’s activities in Palestine — and a casino that,
according to Jim Hougan, would siphon money off to finance the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO).™ Yet, at the same time, Zionist-aligned
gangsters, bankers and other figures were caught up in its web. This apparent
contradiction was ultimately indicative of a trend that would grow in the 1970s
and 1980s: a “behind-the-scenes” alignment between the ruling elites of Arab
societies, enriched by the petrodollar system, and the Israeli business class and
security apparatus. This tension-filled, often contradictory and ever-shifting
alignment was of considerable interest to the US, which often found itself serving
as the mediator between these two forces. The US, of course, would use that role
as its pivot-point in its attempts to dominate the Middle East. This environment
was fertile soil for crooks, businessmen and operatives of all types - many of
whom were interlaced with the command structures of Western (and sometimes
Eastern) intelligence services.

BANKERS AND TANKERS: THE WORLD OF BRUCE
RAPPAPORT

hile he was President Ronald Reagan’s director of the CIA, William Casey,

maintained — much to the chagrin of many in the Agency — an informal
intelligence apparatus composed of his close friends and associates. Nicknamed
the “Hardy Boys,’ this group lacked CIA clearances but its members “had their
own back door, so to speak, into Langley. They would ride upstairs in Casey’s own
elevator” Among this clique was Max Hugel, who managed to be appointed
deputy director of the CIA before his history of dubious stock trading caught up
with him. Hugel makes a brief appearance later, in Chapter 10.

Other members, who will also be discussed in later chapters of this book,
included John Shaheen and Robert B. Anderson. Shaheen, an oil trader, played a
role in the October Surprise affair, while Robert B. Anderson's career veered from
being a prominent figure in the Eisenhower administration to being disbarred for
money laundering in 1980s. One of Casey’s most important friends, however, was
Bruce Rappaport.

Across the latter half of the twentieth century, Rappaport left a string of
business deals that were mind-numbing in their complexity and tied to fraud,
intelligence-linked bust-out operations, and backroom dealings, all of which was
facilitated by a sophisticated web of interlocking shipping companies, banks, oil
companies, mines, and numerous other holdings. Rappaport and Casey were
sometimes co-participants in these activities, some of which predated Casey's
time at the CIA. During the 1980s, they were also known to be golfing buddies,
and made frequent visits together to the Deepdale Golf Club on Long Island.

“When Rappaport visited Deepdale,’ writes Alan Block, the author of an
exhaustive study on his life and times, “his chauffeur was often Louis Filardo, an
alleged associate of New York area mobsters.’“* By the late 1980s — if not earlier —
he was tied to Russian organized crime interests, including Semion Mogilevich,
the “boss of bosses” of Russian crime syndicates who makes several appearances
later in this book. With a position on the FBIs top 10 most wanted list,
Mogilevich is described by the bureau as a leader in “weapons trafficking, contract
murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale”48
Interestingly, it is quite possible that Rappaport had been introduced to
Mogilevich by none other than Robert Maxwell, who, by the late 1980s, had
become a key business partner of Mogilevich’s and facilitated Mogilevich’s entry
into the Israeli and US financial systems. Another contact of Mogilevich’s crime
networks was the aforementioned banker Edmond Safra, who was acquainted
with both Maxwell and Rappaport.*°

Rappaport’s origins are murky, though a few facts are known. He was born in
Haifa, Palestine, in 1922 to a family that had settled there from Ukraine. At some
point he earned a law degree, and spent time as a judge after Israel’s founding. He
also served in the IDF, achieving the rank equivalent to major. His military career,
however, had begun before the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Rappaport has stated that he spent a portion of World War II fighting with the
British Army, who dispatched him to Africa. He may have been a member of the
African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps, later shortened to the African Pioneer Corps.
The Corps had existed from 1941 until 1946, and had started off as a logistic
support unit that gradually expanded to include combat capabilities. Many of the
African Pioneers were attached to the Ninth Army, one of the British field armies
that was part of the Middle East Command. Rappaport was also reportedly a
member of the Special Interrogation Group (SIG), the British commando group

made up Jewish volunteers from Mandatory Palestine. SIG recruited heavily from
the ranks of the Haganah, the Irgun and the Special Night Squads.

After the war, Rappaport joined the 6" Airborne Division, another British
Army outfit. This was an airborne infantry division that had been deployed to
Palestine in the late 1940s, and worked closely with Jewish groups in the region to
administer the territories until Israel’s creation in 1948. The 6" Airborne, which
had a fairly significant casualty rate among its personnel, worked to regulate and
balance the competing interests of Jewish and Arab factions in the region, while
also laying the logistical groundwork for the steady influx of refugees from Europe.

During his time with the 6 Airborne, Rappaport helped organize Israel’s
military police. Soon, however, he began to focus more on his another of his
interests — the world of criminal enterprises and covert operations. According to
Alan Block, a Scotland Yard report provided some of the earliest known
information on Rappaport’s shadier activities, charging that “in the early 1950s,
Rappaport and Teddy Kollek, who became the charismatic mayor of Jerusalem,
devised a scam on construction materials serious enough to produce warrants.’*4
Israeli newspapers reported a similar story, but sometimes Paul Kollek - Teddy’s
brother — was instead identified as Rappaport’s partner. Regardless of which
Kollek was actually involved, Rappaport’s proximity to the Kollek brothers points
to his own proximity to the centers of power in nascent Israel. This connection is
also one that leads back to the Haganah and the inter-mixing of intelligence and
organized crime: Teddy Kollek, in the 1940s, “ran the day-to-day operations of the
arms procurement” in New York for the Haganah, which brought him into contact
with the city’s criminal elements.4® His close contacts included Al Schwimmer
and Yehuda Arazi, and he worked with the two in delivering aircraft to Israel by
way of intermediaries in South America.

Kollek’s activities put him on the radar of British intelligence and their interest
in him was multi-fold. On the one hand, he was treated with suspicion: “His
phone was bugged, his bags were searched” and his movements were consistently
tracked. On the other hand, he was actively courted by MIS — first indirectly,
and then later directly. Kollek’s main contact with British intelligence was through
an MIS officer named Simkin. The two had a mutual friend, Ben Aharon, who was
reportedly an ardent Bolshevik who would subsequently become head of the
Histadrut, the centralized body that coordinated Israel’s trade unions. Aharon’s
wife, Miriam, worked for the Shai, the intelligence apparatus of the Haganah.

After his scam with one of the Kollek brothers went bust, Rappaport fled
Israel. Over the course of his lifetime, he held passports for numerous countries:
he was listed as a citizen of Panama, Costa Rica, Israel, and Switzerland. It was the
latter location where he settled down in the early 1950s. Early support for his
Swiss ventures came from the Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS), a Geneva-
based multinational that provides inspection and verification services for
international trade.°2 Besides SGS, another entity that helped Rappaport launch
his early activities was Swiss-Israel Trade Bank, headquartered in Geneva.
According to Rappaport, he knew Swiss-Israel’s owner, who provided him with
loans. Interestingly, the bank’s original founder and owner - likely who
Rappaport was referring to — was Gideon Persky.*

Gideon was the brother of Shimon Peres, the leading Israeli Labor Party
politician who would later serve as both president and prime minister of the
country and become a close friend of Robert Maxwell and, later, his daughter
Isabel. Years later, Ehud Barak, who would later serve as Israel’s Defense Minister
and Prime Minister, alleged that Shimon Peres had been the person who had
originally introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein.$ Shimon, a veteran of the Haganah,
had joined the IDF towards the end of the 1940s, and was appointed by David
Ben-Gurion as the chief purchaser of munitions for Israels military. By 1953,
Shimon headed Israel’s Ministry of Defense. According to Jonathan Nitzan and
Shimshon Bichler, Shimon’s control over defense spending greatly benefited the
businesses of his brother.

That Swiss-Israel helped prop up Rappaport is significant, as it was effectively
a Mossad front in Europe.2* Overseeing the bank’s daily operations was Yehuda
Assia, who was actively on the Mossad payroll. Under his direction, the bank both
raised funds for the bank and acted as a conduit for the financing of its
international operations. It was also utilized to raise money for the construction of
nuclear reactors that played a major role in Israel’s covert construction of nuclear
weapons. Avner Cohen, in his book Israel and the Bomb, writes that Ben-Gurion
and Shimon Peres “conducted [the management of funds] outside the official
state budget,” and had enlisted the aid of an American-Jewish fundraiser and
businessman named Abraham Feinberg to locate private donors.°= Feinberg ran
American Bank & Trust, a subsidiary of Swiss-Israel.5°

There are other lines running from Swiss-Israel to the worlds of organized
crime and - unsurprisingly — to Helliwell’s banking complex. Prior to his

relocation to Geneva to take over the operations of Swiss-Israel, Yehuda Assia
spent World War II in Thailand, where he met General Phao Sriyanonda.>4
During the 1950s, Phao spent a considerable amount of time in Geneva, where he
lived with Assia. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Phao was closely connected to
Helliwell, and stood at a nexus of American intelligence’s complicity in the opium
trade during the post-war period.

In 1960, Assia was contacted by Irving Davidson — a powerful lobbyist whose
clients included the CIA, the Teamsters, Texas oil giant Clinton Murchison, and
the state of Israel - concerning a Bahamian bank called Guarantee Trust
Company.“ Guarantee Trust was run by a major supporter of Israel named Abe
Multer and was one of the offshore entities that handled hot money flows from
the Teamsters pension fund and from other organized criminal activities, such as
the skim from casinos. The vice chairman of the bank was Leonard Bursten, a
former director of Miami National Bank — which, as previously mentioned in
Chapter 1, had been founded with the aid of a loan from the Teamster pension
fund and had employed the services of Paul Helliwell’s law firm.

With these early ties, Rappaport’s empire began to expand in all directions,
interlocking with shipping and financial interests all over the world. This process
began in 1959, with the creation of International Maritime Services and
International Maritime Supplies Company Limited. The latter company was
closely linked to a shipping concern in the UK called Wilson (London &
International) Limited, which was soon joined by a trio of major maritime
companies. These were, per Alan Block, “a Dutch company, N.S. Frank & Zoon,
NV.; the American Maritime Supply Service Inc., based in Chicago; and the
Italian Maritime Supplies Co. Ltd. Rappaport noted with glee that with three
other firms buying into International Maritime ... it would be possible to have a
shipping clientele of 161 firms that will cover the entire world.’>2

In those early years, Rappaport formed what would be a lifelong connection
to the Kulukundis family, a Greek shipping clan who had set up shop in the
United States and in Great Britain. Michael Kulukundis was the co-organizer of
International Maritime Supplies, and court documents show that, as early as 1961,
the pair were using the company to run scams and loot the coffers of unsuspecting
businesses. At the same time, the Kulukundis family advanced their own
shipping interests through London & Overseas Freighters, which, in time, would

boast an impressive fleet of tankers that played a significant role in the global oil
trade. Some of the affairs of the Kulukundis family will be discussed in Chapter 6.

In the early 1960s, Inter Maritime Supplies owned a stake in London &
Overseas Freighters. It is worth mentioning that London & Overseas was formed
by the Kulukundis family with their cousins, the Mavroleon family. As will be
noted in Chapter 15, the Mavroleons were themselves connected to the circles
around Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. For several years, Ghislaine
Maxwell dated Gianfranco Cicogna, whose mother had been married to the
patriarch of the Mavroleon family — and original founder of London & Overseas —
Basil “Bluey” Mavroleon. Contact information for Bluey Mavroleon and his son,
Nicholas Mavroleon (Gianfranco’s half-brother), can be found in Epstein’s black
book of contacts.

It wasn't until 1965 that Rappaport set up the institution that would later
stand at the center of his complex network of firms and money conduits: Inter
Maritime Bank (IMB). IMB, writes Block, “had A and B shareholders.’ The
various holders of Class B stock were representatives of banking institutions that
were in business with Rappaport. These included Klaus Uilke Polstra,
representing Bank M. van Embden, and Rolando Zoppi, representing Weisscredit,
a bank in the Swiss Canton of Ticino. Nestled near the border of Swiss and Italy,
Weisscredit was identified by the US State Department as a bank utilized by
numerous Italians involved with organized crime to hide their money from
financial authorities in their home country.&+ Zoppi would wind up with a five-
year prison sentence in 1975 when Weisscredit lost some $150 million of
depositors’ money due to “fraud and mismanagement in high-risk speculative
operations.’

Another holder of Class B stock was David Hodara, from the Swiss financial
outfit Sofigest. Sofigest would later be involved in the strange affairs of Investors
Overseas Services, an international mutual fund and capital flight apparatus with
ties to Tibor Rosenbaum and Meyer Lansky. Later, Sofigest would emerge in
Brazil, where it was involved in everything from a joint venture with Fiat to frauds
perpetuated by the infamous Naji Nahas.

When it came to the holders of Class A stock, things were a bit more limited.
The bulk was held by Rappaport himself, albeit filtered through various other
companies that he either owned or controlled. The rest were held by E.P. Barry -
the OSS veteran who, as mentioned in Chapter 1 was one of the primary figures in

Paul Helliwell’s Florida banking network. In fact, at the same time that Barry was
involved with HMT/Florida Shares, the holding company for some of Helliwell’s
banks, he came to hold IMB Class A shares. This link to the world of Helliwell
would endure: one of Rappaport’s chief financial allies, and an architect of a large
number of his ventures, was Helliwell’s banking partner Burton Kanter, also an
affiliate of the mob.

Over the decades, there has been a slow and steady trickle of news articles in
major publications that examine Bruce Rappaport. In 1988, the New York Times
published on Rappaport entitled “A Secret Emperor of Oil and Shipping.” The
article described how Rappaport had:

[ ... }developed a reputation for both openness and secrecy. On one hand, Mr. Rappaport — who

is said by some associates to be a billionaire — sponsors golf and tennis tournaments and gives

huge sums to a host of charities, especially medical and Jewish ones. On the other hand, former

and current business associates say Mr. Rappaport is involved in hundreds of companies,

registered in remote places like Liberia and Panama, to run his banking, shipping and oil
64

empire.—

The appearance of Rappaport in Liberia is particularly interesting. It was there
that he had established one of his many Inter Maritime outfits; in this case, it was
Inter Maritime Owners Corporation of Monrovia. Liberia was a favorite for
owners of shipping companies: besides the low tax rates, the astoundingly lax
regulation, and the degree of bank secrecy, the country boasts a robust flags of
convenience system, which “allows ship owners to register their vessels in an
alternative sovereign to their place of origin”fś Liberias shipping registry system
also has some unique characteristics: it was managed not in Liberia itself, but was
overseen by International Bank, located in Washington DC. The longtime
controller of International Bank, George Olmsted, would end up on the periphery
of the BCCI affair, discussed later in Chapter 7.

Rappaport wasn't a lone figure in this network with ties to Liberia; in fact,
there is every indication that Liberia was of immense importance to a number of
the individuals that have discussed in this chapter. Tibor Rosenbaum, for example,
was listed as the managing director of Swiss-Liberian Finance Corporation in
1954. That year, Swiss-Liberian Finance Corporation provided a multi-million
dollar line of credit to help capitalize the Bank of Liberia Inc. - a development
bank partially controlled by the Liberian government.© Other capital inflows for
the Bank of Liberia came from the Bank of Monrovia and the Liberian Trade and

Development Corp (TRADEVCO). The Bank of Monrovia had first been owned
by the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company before it was acquired by the First
National City Bank, an institution controlled by the Rockefeller family.“
TRADEVCO, meanwhile, was controlled by a group of Italian banks.

Tax banking laws and the flags of convenience system certainly helped attract
people to Liberia. Another may have been the lucrative diamond trade: during the
1950s, the country became the primary transshipment point for the flow of
diamonds from countries like Sierra Leone to diamond cutting hubs.® Many of
these hubs were located in Antwerp and in Israel. In Israel, one of the major banks
involved in the financing of the diamond cutting industry was Bank Leumi, which
opened offices and branches in Liberia early on. The board of Bank Leumi
reportedly interlocked with that of Rosenbaum’s ICB - while Rosenbaum himself
was afhliated with Kupat Am Bank, a subsidiary of Bank Leumi.

Serving as honorary counsel to Liberia in this period was a man named Louis
Mortimer Bloomfield. He was a powerful Canadian attorney with an exhaustive
roster of connections to all sorts of elite figures and institutions, starting with the
law firm he belonged to: Phillips & Vineberg of Montreal. Through its senior co-
partner Lazarus Phillips, it was connected to the Royal Bank of Canada. Libbie
and Frank Park, in their classic study of the Canadian elite establishment, The
Anatomy of Big Business, show that this bank was one of the commanding
institutions in Canada, and acted as a conduit for the entry of foreign capital
originating in the US, the UK and Belgium.

‘The firm was also closely tied to the Bronfman family. Peter Newman writes in
The Bronfman Dynasty that “Because of the many family feuds, two of Montreal’s
best lawyers — Lazarus Phillips and Philip Vineberg - have become ex officio
members of the family, charged with arbitrating among its several factions.’ It
has been alleged that Bloomfield himself did work on behalf of the Bronfmans.
While this is by no means outside the realm of possibility, it is difficult to find
evidence to confirm this particular claim. What is known and extensively
documented, however, is Bloomfield’s ties to a mysterious entity in Rome that was
tied to American, Italian, French, and Israeli intelligence networks — as well as to
international organized criminal actors and their banks.

MOSSAD GOES TO ROME

n 1967, Gershon Peres, a brother of Shimon Peres, joined the board of Centro
Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), the Italian subsidiary of Permindex — a world
trade center organization headquartered first in Basel and then in Rome and

made famous by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's investigation into

the assassination of John F. Kennedy.“ Ostensibly, the purpose of Permindex-

CMC was to maintain what was effectively a permanent world’s fair — a centralized

site where businessmen could display their wares, deals could be made, and

important corporations could maintain offices. On the back end, however,

Permindex-CMC was tied into various covert networks. What first placed

Garrison on the trail of Permindex, for example, was the presence of Clay Shaw, an

apparent CIA contract agent, on their board.

Italian journalist Michele Metta, who recovered a cache of CMC corporate
documents, has shown that Permindex-CMC was plugged into the Italian state
security apparatus, and also had a curious series of connections to Israel. One of
CMC’s founders, Georges Mandel (also known as Giorgio Mantello), was
affiliated with the Banque pour le Commerce Suisse-Amerique Centrale, which
was identified as having “supplied cover employment for [Israeli Intelligence
Service] agents.’ Another CMC board member, Alberto Forte, subsequently
became managing director of Banque Belgo-Centrade — a subsidiary of the
Mossad-linked Swiss-Israel Trade Bank.”

Louis Mortimer Bloomfield has often been described as the founder of
Permindex, and sometimes as its dominant shareholder. This seems to be an
inaccurate picture of his role in the complex, as Bloomfield was Permindex’s
attorney. In this capacity, he was responsible for coordinating all the different
players involved, who were scattered across multiple continents. He does not
appear to have owned stock of his own in Permindex or CMC. Instead, he acted as
a proxy for particular interests, effectively hiding their identities. Their stock was
held in his name, and he occupied their spots on the board.

With the links between Permindex-CMC and the world of intelligence, it is
unsurprising that rumors have circulated for decades that Bloomfield was, during
the Second World War, a member of the OSS. There is little to corroborate this
claim, though he did serve in the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, achieving
the rank of major in August 1946. Correspondences in his archive show that he
was in communication with the British spymaster William Stephenson, who at the
time was active in Canadian industry and finance. Bloomfield did hold

membership in a number of elite organizations, including the Most Venerable
Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem - a British chivalric order
established by royal charter in the 1880s as something of a Protestant counterpart
to the Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta (better known as the Knights of
Malta). He eventually became both the attorney for and president of the Order’s
Quebec Council.

Bloomfield was also attached to a number of Zionist organizations. He served
as honorary counsel to the World Jewish Congress, and was active in building up
the Canadian branches of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union complex. In
addition to organized labor, Bloomfield’s concerns involved maritime commerce
as well. He was president of the Canadian wing of the Israel Maritime League, set
up in the late 1940s to “make the people of Israel ‘sea-conscious.’~ The Israel
Maritime League and the Histadrut were tightly connected: along with the Jewish
Agency, the three organized Zim Shipping, the major transport concern that was a
key supplier of weapons and supplies to Israel in the early days of the state's
existence.“

Later in life, Bloomfield corresponded with George H.W. Bush, including
while Bush was serving as director of the CIA. The letters indicate that the two
first met at a meeting at the Canadian embassy in Beijing in 1975. Bloomfield
appears to have had a long-running fascination with China, having traveled there
as early as 1966 (if not earlier). After that particular trip, he gave public addresses
calling for the normalization of diplomatic relations with the country and for
increased trade relations between the East and the West. As Maurice Phillips — the
first to explore the contents of Bloomfield’s archives — points out, Bloomfield’s
position on China predated that of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
by a number of years.°2

Another prominent figure in touch with Bloomfield was Tibor Rosenbaum.
Permindex documents show that Rosenbaum and his International Credit Bank
were deeply involved with Permindex and CMC. A July 12", 1961, memo from
Bloomfield to Rosenbaum discusses an adjacent project, headed by CMC's
founder Georges Mantello, called Marina Reale.®! Registered in Panama, Marina
Reale was a holding company utilized by Permindex’s principals to acquire real
estate. Just as with Permindex itself, Bloomfield acted as a proxy for shareholders
whose names remain unknown. The communication between him and
Rosenbaum, however, identifies some of the other parties with interests tied up in

Marina Reale. Among these were Dov Biegun, a leading figure in the World
Zionist Organization who became the national secretary for the National
Committee for Labor Israel. Much like Bruce Rappaport and Robert Maxwell,
Biegun spent World War II in the British Army. According to his obituary, he
“served in intelligence operations in France, Holland and Norway.’=2

Another investor in Marina Reale — and one who received his shares directly
from Mantello — was “Nate Dolin of Cleveland, Ohio.’ Dolin achieved notoriety in
1970 when a firm he was connected to, Realty Equities, ran a fraud scheme in
conjunction with Rosenbaum’s ICB. Interestingly, Dolin had a business
relationship with the Lansky-connected mobster Moe Dalitz going back to the
1940s, when they both owned shares of the Cleveland Indians sports team.®*

There were other big names involved in Permindex-CMC’s real estate deals.
Communiqués found in Louis Bloomfield’s archival papers show that his law
partner Stanley Vineberg was keeping a close eye on these developments, and
perhaps even had a role in these transactions that superseded that of Bloomfield.
These same cables identified a French company called Compagnie Financiére as
holding a 10% stake in one of the real estate ventures. Compagnie Financiére had
been set up in 1953 by Francois Pereire, a scion of the famed French banking
family, and Edmond de Rothschild, who exerted dominant control over the
institution. Today, Compagnie Financiére is known as the Edmond de Rothschild
Group.

Rothschild was also a business partner of Tibor Rosenbaum: the two had
organized the Israel Corporation, “Israel's largest investment company,’ designed
to “encourage large-scale private investment in Israel” When it was discovered in
1974 that Rosenbaum had bilked the company to the tune of $60 million dollars,
the Israeli government linked up a small handful of the country’s leading banks “to
participate in efforts to prevent its liquidation”? One of these banks was Bank
Leumi.

Rothschild himself appears all over Bloomfield’s correspondences, and was
clearly intimately involved with Permindex-CMC’s activities. One cable from
Bloomfield to Abraham Friedman at the Israel Continental Oil Corporation in
Tel-Aviv requested that Friedman discuss matters relevant to the Italian real estate
deals with Rothschild. Intriguingly, the Oil and Petroleum Year Book identifies
Israel Continental Oil as having been set up in Canada in 1952, while Canadian
government records show that Louis Bloomfield’s nephew, Bernard Bloomfield —

mentioned earlier as a director of International Credit Bank’s subsidiary, Atlas
Bank — was the oil producer’s president.88
According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, a year after Israel Continental Oil
was founded, it became a player in a consortium of oil firms looking to drill “near
the Dead Sea and in other sections of Israel.”82 Other partners in this consortium
included Husky Oil Company, which was affiliated with the aforementioned mob-
linked Rimrock Tidelands oil company, and New Continental Oil Company, with
which Israel Continental Oil set up joint ventures in Canada. The president of
New Continental was Frank Kaftel, an organized crime associate and stock
manipulator originally from Cleveland, the stomping grounds of Moe Dalitz and
CMC investor Nate Dolin. Federal Bureau of Narcotics documents identified
Kaftel as a close associate of “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli - the aforementioned
mobster and businessman who had been involved in the running of arms to
Israel.24
Another Canadian-based oil concern active in the Israel petroleum industry of
the early 1960s was Tri-Continental Pipelines, where Edmond de Rothschild,
Francois Pereire, and Louis Bloomfield could all be found. Galina Nikitina, in
her political and economic history of the state of Israel, notes that Tri Continental
was part of a group that controlled a pipeline from Eilat to Haifa — the basis for the
larger “Trans-Israel Pipeline” that linked Israel and Iran - alongside the Miami
Group and the Palestine Economic Corporation (PEC).22 The Miami Group, as
mentioned above, maintained ties to organized crime interests and was also
connected to the family of companies that was partnered with the Israel
Continental Oil Corporation. PEC, on the other hand, was a primary conduit for
the investment of American capital into nascent Israeli industries. To quote
Nikitina:
[ ... described as the largest American private investor in Israel, [PEC] was formed in 1926 as
an instrument through which American Jews could render material assistance to production
enterprises in Palestine. In only the period from 1950 to 1959 its capital increased 70 percent.
PEC assets totalled 19,300,000 dollars in 1961. It has numerous daughter companies, banks and
agencies, and shares in other companies. Having grown to gigantic proportions, PEC has its
tentacles in all the key branches of Israel’s economy.
PEC is linked with leading financial and industrial monopolies in the USA, such as the Wall

Street bankers Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company (one of the eight largest financial
groups in the USA), the Mellon group of Pittsburgh, the Cabot Lodge group of Boston, and the

Hanna group of Cleveland.”

This particular network of individuals and institutions is complex and
convoluted; yet, what is clear is that there was something of an Israel-Italy-France-
Canada axis that was tied directly into hot money networks in the Caribbean, to
the flow of capital from the west into Israel itself, and to the outflows of raw
materials (like diamonds) from the “third world.” Once this foreign investment —
generally from American and Canadian sources — was in Israel, it went to work
building up various industries. It appears, then, that the logical successor to the
earlier efforts to raise money, supplies, and weapons for the Zionist paramilitary
groups in Mandatory Palestine was now all about building up the capacities of the
new state.

As for the more narrow case of Permindex-CMC itself, it is clear how this
“world trade center” would have been beneficial for engendering international
capital flows and business arrangements of this very nature. At the same time,
however, the links between these entities and intelligence services, like the CIA,
the Italian special services and Mossad, also suggests a more covert imperative.

Michele Metta, in his book on Permindex, notes that, in the early 1960s,
special arrangements were made between Israel and Italy to support the OAS —
the French paramilitary group — in Algeria, in return for Italian oil companies
getting access to Algerian crude. While the geopolitical implications of this
arrangement are wide-ranging, it was also intimately connected to CMC. Leading
these secret negotiations was former Italian prime minister Fernando Tambroni,
whose son-in-law, Micucci Cecchi, sat on the board of CMC. On the side of the
OAS, the negotiations were reportedly handled by the paramilitary leader Jacques
Soustelle.”

This particular angle emerged during the investigation into the mysterious
death of Enrico Mattei, whose plane exploded in October 1962. Mattei was the
head of ENI, the dominant oil and gas firm in Italy that supplied, among other
things, petroleum to NATO and the US Sixth Fleet. In the early 1960s, however,
Mattei had embarked on something of a path different from the status quo of Cold
War politics. He sought to sign oil agreements with the Soviet Union, and with
Algerian and Egyptian interests who were, at the time, opposed to Israel.

With such a pivot taking place, theories that Mattei’s death was less than
accidental have existed for decades and have also led to multiple official inquiries
into the incident. Italian journalist Fulvio Bellini turned over information
allegedly identifying the real culprits to one of these inquiries headed by the

judicial magistrate Vincenzo Calia. “I think to understand the death of Enrico
Mattei,” Bellini told Calia, “you need to follow the trail to Jacques Soustelle. This
was the man given the job of doing Operation Mattei with around one hundred
thousand dollars from Montreal, through Permindex.”8

And what, then, of the connections to organized crime networks? One
possibility is that, through its connection with Tibor Rosenbaum’s International
Credit Bank, Permindex-CMC was involved with money laundering activities. In
one of the earliest exposes of Permindex-CMC, published by investigative
journalist Mario Ugazzi in the now-defunct Paese Sera, a company called the Italo-
American Hotel Corporation (IAHC) was identified as an affiliate of CMC
(Metta, meanwhile, describes IAHC as a subsidiary of CMC).22 IAHC was
dedicated to high-end real estate development in various locations in Rome. One
of its big projects was the Hotel du Lac, curiously located next to ENI’s
headquarters.122

Financing for [AHC’s projects came from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL)
— a bank that, as will be discussed in Chapter 7, was tied to notorious banks like
BCCI and Banco Ambrosiano and also played a role in the flow of weapons to Iraq
in the 1980s. The money that BNL handled, however, came from a variety of
other sources in Geneva and Lichtenstein. One of these sources was none other
than ICB. While this is to be expected given Rosenbaum’s numerous ties to
Permindex-CMC, it does raise questions about the ultimate provenance of this
money. Given that ICB was moving the hot money being poured into its
correspondent banks into the Caribbean, it is possible that, via these various
companies, this money was being put into Italian real estate ventures.

Such conclusions are at best speculative. Yet, what is certain and undeniable is
that much of the wartime OSS and CIA as well as Israel's intelligence services
operated in close proximity to, and were effectively indistinguishable from,
organized crime. What’s unique in Israel's case, however, is that such collusion was
baked in at the very foundations of, not only its intelligence service, but the
origins of the state itself.

Endnotes

Oo ON OV

20

21

“Samuel Bronfman Dead at 80; Founded Distillers Corporation,” New York Times, July 11,
1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/1 1/archives/samuel-bronfman-dead-at-80-
foundeddistillers-corporation-his.html.

Peter C. Newman, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1978), 46.

“Samuel Bronfman,’ Entrepreneur, October 10, 2008,
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197618.

Wolfgang Saxon, “Rudolf Sonneborn Dies at 87; A Zionist Leader in the US,” New York Times,
June 4, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/04/obituaries/rudolf-sonneborn-dies-at-
87-a-zionist-leader-in-the-us.html.

Ricky-Dale Calhoun, “Arming David: The Haganah’s Illegal Arms Procurement Network in the
United States, 1945-49,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 4 (July 1, 2007): 22-32,
https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2007.36.4.22.

Calhoun, “Arming David,’ 25.

Calhoun, “Arming David,’ 26.

“Marina Request Rouses Protest,” Miami News, October 31, 1958.

Robert Rockaway, “Gangsters for Zion,’ Tablet, April 18, 2018,
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/gangsters-for-zion.

Michael Feldberg and American Jewish Historical Society, Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in
American Jewish History (NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2002), 223.

“Federal Bureau of Narcotics Memo on Joseph Zicarelli,’ Doug Valentine Drug War
documents, April 1, 1961, http://archive.org/details/DougValentineDrugWarDocuments.
Scott M. Deitche, Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 84.

Jonathan Marshall, Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of
American Democracy: From Truman to Trump, ePub (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021),
107.

Valentine, “Memo on Joseph Zicarelli.”

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), 54.

Calhoun, “Arming David,’ 30.

See, for example, Ignacio Klich, “Latin America, the United States and the Birth of Israel: The
Case of Somoza’s Nicaragua,’ Journal of Latin American Studies 20, no. 2 (November 1988):
389-432, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X00003047.

Calhoun, “Arming David,’ 27.

Margo Gutierrez, “Israel in Central America,” Middle East Research and Information Project,
June 1986, https://merip.org/1986/05/israel-in-central-america/.

Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America: The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York:
Morrow, 1978), 172.

Hougan, Spooks,172.

22

23
24
25

26
27

28
29

30

31

32

33
34

35
36
37

38
39
40

41
42
43

44

45

46

47
48

Sandy Smith, “Monsters in the Marketplace: Money, Muscle, Murder,’ Life, September 8,
1967.

Smith, “Monsters.”

Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 204.

Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (New York:
Paddington Press, 1979), 266.

Marshall. Dark Quadrant, 247-48.

Jonathan Marshall, “Nixon’s Caribbean Milieu, 1950-1968,” Dark Quadrant Appendix,

Marshall, “Nixon's Caribbean Milieu.”

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996), 202-
5.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the
Bahamas (Routledge, 1991), 51.

R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (New York: Linden Press, 1987), 34; Jonathan
Marshall, The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic
(California: Stanford University Press, 2012), 49.

Marshall, The Lebanese Connection, 50.

Marshall, The Lebanese Connection, 53.

Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign
Relations, 102nd Congress 2nd Session US Senate, December 1992, 299.

Marshall, The Lebanese Connection, 43.

Marshall, The Lebanese Connection, 134.

Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of the War on Drugs, ePub
(Verso, 2004), 407.

Marshall, The Lebanese Connection, 47.

Hougan, Spooks, 213.

Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism (Montreal:
Black Rose Books, 1980), 88.

Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 261.

Hougan, Spooks, 213.

Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI
(Ramjac Inc, 1991), 309.

Alan A. Block and Constance Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money
Laundering, and International Organized Crime, (Praeger, 2004), 27.

“Top Ten Fugitives - Global Con Artist and Ruthless Criminals,” FBI, October 2009,
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/october/mogilevich_ 102109.

The use of Safra’s Republic National Bank by Russian organized crime interests, some of
which involving Mogilevich, is discussed in Constance and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire;
Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Invaded America (Little, Brown &
Company, 2000).

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 8.

Rockaway, “Gangsters for Zion.’

49
50

51
52

53

54

55
56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

Marc Goldberg, “Teddy Kollek: The British Spy Who Never Was,’ Tablet, December 15, 2020.
“Baruch Rappaport, the man who founded and continues to support the Faculty of
Medicine at the Technion, speaks for the first time in the media,’ Hayadan, October 19, 2004.
“Baruch Rappaport”

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel (Pluto Books,
2002), 116.

Noga Tarnopolsky, “Ehud Barak: | Visited Epstein’s Island But Never Met Any Girls,” The Daily
Beast, July 15, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-ehud-barak-i-visited-epsteins-
island-but-never-met-any-girls.

“Yehuda Assia Banker to the Mossad, Dies at 99,’ Haaretz, September 3, 2016.

Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 1998), 70.

Jonathan Marshall, “Bayonne Joe’ Zicarelli, Irving Davidson, and Israel,’

American Bank & Trust appeared in the strange story of Argentine financier David Graiver,
who controlled the bank at the time of its collapse in 1976. Graiver had maintained a bank
in Belgium called Banque pour l’ Amerique du Sud (BAS), which according to Barron's
journalist Richard Karp was simply a money laundering operation. In order to finance BAS,
Graiver took control of American Bank & Trust and systematically looted it via the aid of
roughly 13 dummy companies set up to create a byzantine maze of money flows. In the
end, both BAS and American Bank fell apart, and Graiver allegedly died in a fiery plane crash
near Mexico City - though suspicions abounded that he faked his death. It was
subsequently revealed that Graiver may have been the banker for the Montoneros, a left-
wing Peronist paramilitary organization. See Richard Karp, “Hands Across the Sea: Millions
Were Looted from the American Bank & Trust,’ Barron’s, December 27, 1976; Steven Rattner,
“Financial Intrigue, Mystery Shroud American Bank and Trust Collapse,’ New York Times,
September 25, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/25/archives/financial-intrigue-
mystery-shroud-american-bank-and-trust-collapse.html; Karen DeYoung, “Argentine
Watergate’: Charges of Guerrilla High Finance,’ Washington Post, April 18, 1977,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/04/18/argentine-watergate-
charges-of-guerrilla-high-finance/5e3b5b2b-d260-48da-a284-9ea9b4b33825/.

Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 185-86.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire, 9.

See Atlantic Steamers Supply Co., Inc against Manuel E. Kulukundis, New York Supreme Court
“Margaret P. Grafeld Declassified,’ US Department of State, May 22, 2009,
https://archive.org/details/State-Dept-cable-1977-243051/page/n1/mode/2up?
q=Weisscredit&view=theater.

“4 Swiss Bankers Convicted,’ New York Times, March 1, 1979,
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/03/01/archives/4-swiss-bankers-convicted.html.

Steven Greenhouse, “A Secret Emperor of Oil and Shipping,’ New York Times, February 4,
1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/04/world/a-secret-emperor-of-oil-and-
shipping.html

Greenhouse, “Secret Emperor.’

“Liberia's Flags of Convenience,’ Al-Jazeera, November 15, 2011,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/10/15/liberias-flags-of-convenience.

“The New Bank of Liberia,’ Liberia Today, Vol. 3-4, 1954, 8.

67

68

69
70
71

#2

73

74

75

76
77

On Bank of Monrovia and First National City Bank, see Area Handbook for Liberia, US
Government Printing Office, 1964, 340. The influence of the Rockefeller family at First
National City came via the presence of James Stillman Rockefeller. He went to work for the
bank in 1930s, was elected president in 1952, and became its chairman in 1959. Wolfgang
Saxon, “James S. Rockefeller, 102, Dies; Was a Banker and ‘24 Olympian,” New York Times,
August 11, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/1 1/business/james-s-rockefeller-102-
dies-was-a-banker-and-a-24-

d%20financial%20power.

See lan Smillie, Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade
(Anthem Press, 2010). FO a historical background on the role of Israel in the global diamond
trade and diamond cutting industry, see David De Vries, Diamonds and War: State, Capital
and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine (Berghahn Books, 2010).

Libbie Park and Frank Park, The Anatomy of Big Business (Progress Books, 1973), 71-77.

Park and Park, Anatomy of Big Business, 21.

Michele Metta, “Gershon Peres (brother of former Israeli president) was a member of the
CMC,’ Anti-Diplomatico, November 22, 2017, https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/dettnews-
esclusivo ad _gershon peres fratello dellex presidente israeliano stato membro del c
mc il centro occulto della cia legato _allomicidio kennedy/6_22228/; Michele Metta, On
the Trail of Clay Shaw: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of
JFK (Independent, 2019), 141-42.

For an overview of Jim Garrison’s interest in Clay Shaw and Shaw's ties to the CIA, see Joan
Mellen, “Clay Shaw Unmasked: The Garrison Case Corroborated”

corroborated/2/.

One of Metta’s most fascinating discoveries is that board meetings of CMC and its
subsidiary, the Italo-American Hotel Corporation, were held in the law offices of Robert
Ascarelli at 72/A Piazza di Spagna, in Rome. When Licio Gelli was first organizing the
infamous P2 Masonic Lodge, which operated as a sort of shadow government within Italy,
the early meetings took place in these same law offices. Gelli stated that “In the first phase
we celebrated the initiation rituals [to P2] in Ascarelli’s office, at number 72 in Piazza di
Spagna, on the third floor... As it wasn’t a Masonic headquarters, we used a portable temple
which we carried in a briefcase that we opened on the table... For each initiation, | provided
Ascarelli with the new Freemason’s curriculum vitae, so that when the ceremony was
finished he could talk to the neophyte about his job and his experiences.’ Metta, On the Trail
of Clay Shaw, 39.

Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 143.

Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 142. One of the directors of Banque Belgo-Centrade was
one Arturo Klein, described by Metta as a ‘Chilean right-winger’ Interestingly, a heavily-
redacted CIA report published in a US Senate Subcommittee on International Operations n
assassination plot against Jimmy Carter. “A Staff Report Concerning Activities of Foreign
Intelligence Agencies in the United States,” Subcommittee on International Operations,
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, January 18, 1979, 118-122.

“Louis M. Bloomfield,’ Canadian Jewish Chronicle, April 7, 1967.

“Israel Day Observation Here Monday,’ The Gazette (Montreal), May 25, 1965; Matitiahu
Hindes, “Israel and the Sea,’ Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, September 23, 1949.

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91
92

93

94
95
96
97

Bernard Reich and David H. Goldberg, Historical Dictionary of Israel (Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2016), 558.

Letter from George H.W. Bush to Louis M. Bloomfield, February 11, 1976,
https://www.kennedysandking.com/images/2019/kowalski-metta/exhibit-9.pdf.

Maurice Phillips, “Revelations from the Bloomfield Archives (4): Permindex, Bloomfield
Linked to Freemasons and Rothschilds,’ | Have Some Secrets For You, April 14, 2010,

4.html.

“Cable from Louis M. Bloomfield to Tibor Rosenbaum,” July 12, 1961.
https://www.kennedysandking.com/images/2019/kowalski-metta/exhibit-8.pdf.

“Dov Biegun Dead at 66,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 22, 1980,
https://www.jta.org/archive/dov-biegun-dead-at-66.

“Realty Equity Official, Others Indicted on Charges Tied to Sale of Firm's Notes,” Wall Street
Journal, April 14, 1969.

Randall Cannon and Michael Gerry, Stardust International Raceway: Motorsports Meets the
Mob in Vegas, 1965-1971 (McFarland, Incorporated, 2018), 346.

Maurice Phillips, “The Permindex Papers Il: Canadian Attorneys, Venezuelan Corporation,
and French Rothschild,’ | Have Some Secrets for You, May 16, 2010,

“Israeli Corporation - Rosenbaum - International Credit Bank Controversy,’ Wikileaks (Israel
Tel Aviv, September 30, 1974), https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974TELAVO5552_b.html.
Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Israeli Investing Scandal Unveiled By Rothschild,’ New York Times,
October 19, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/19/archives/israeli-investing-scandal-
unveiled-by-rothschild.html.

Oil and Petroleum Year Book, Volume 58, 1967, p. 58; Report of the Royal Commission
Appointed to Inquire Into the Failure of Atlantic Acceptance Corporation, Limited,

israel-agency-reports.

Alan Philips, “The Inner Workings of a Crime Cartel,’ Macleans, October 5, 1963,
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1963/10/5/the-inner-workings-of-the-crime-cartel.

FBN Memo on Joseph Zicarelli.

“Cable from Louis M. Bloomfield to Joseph Kowalaski,’ June 27, 1959,
https://archive.org/details/bloomfield_201907/Tri%20Continental%20Pipe%20Lines/mode/
1up.

Galina Nikitina, The State of Israel: A Historical, Economic and Political Study (Progress
Publishers, 1973), 290.

Nikitina, The State of Israel, 292.

Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 167-168.

Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 167.

Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 167. Further information on the relationship between Israeli
intelligence services, Soustelle and the OAS can be found in Sylvia K. Crosbie, A Tacit
Alliance: France and Israel from Suez to the Six Day War (Princeton University Press, 2015), 140-

41. The Italian newspaper Paesa Sera reported that Permindex’'s president, Ferenc Nagy, had
helped finance the activities of Soustelle and the OAS. “The Kennedy Conspiracy,’ Paesa
Sera, date unknown, http://www.kenrahn.com/Marsh/Scans/Permindex.txt. Ferenc Nagy’s
papers archives at Colombia University libraries in New York City show extensive
correspondence between him and figures like Tibor Rosenbaum, William Donovan, and a
“Dr. Rappaport.” It is unknown whether or not Dr. Rappaport is Bruce Rappaport.

98 Metta, On the Trail of Clay Shaw, 170.

99 Mario Ugazzi, “The Mysterious Activity in Rome of the Businessman Prosecuted for the
Kennedy Assassination,’ Paese Sera, date unknown,
http://www.kenrahn.com/Marsh/New_Scans/CMC.txt

100 Ugazzi, “The Mysterious Activity in Rome.’

CHAPTER 4

ROY COHN’S “FAVOR BANK”

“THE CITY’S PREEMINENT MANIPULATOR”

Ry Cohn, whose public reputation ranged from “boy wonder” to sleazy mob
awyer over the course of his lifetime, was one of the most influential political
operators in the country for the better part of three decades. Not only would he
serve as Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man during the height of the Red Scare, he
would also help secure electoral victories for prominent politicians in New York
and beyond, including for US presidents. Years after his death, Cohn’s protégé,
New York real estate billionaire Donald Trump, would serve as the 45" president
of the United States.

Yet, for someone who was so influential, both his admirers and detractors
have declined to dig too deeply into his career and dealings, particularly those that
are most unsavory. Part of this may owe to Cohn’s apparently contradictory nature
— he was an anti-communist crusader that closely collaborated with the FBI as
well as a close confidant, business associate, and legal counsel to some of the
biggest names in organized crime. Perhaps for that reason, Cohn’s story is central
when detailing the rise of the networks that are the focus of this book.

Roy Cohn was a man once called New York City’s “preeminent manipulator,”
precisely because he was “a one-man network of contacts that have reached into
City Hall, the mob, the press, the Archdiocese, the disco-jet set, the courts and the
backrooms of the Bronx and Brooklyn where judges are made and political
contributions are arranged.” In addition, Cohn’s ability to manipulate the press,
politics and much more may have been partially due to his ability to wield
blackmail in a way similar that practiced by his close associate and friend, J. Edgar
Hoover. This particular relationship, aspects of which were discussed in Chapter 2,
may explain why, long after Cohn’s death in 1986, much of the FBI file on Cohn -

believed to be over 4,000 pages long in total — has still not been made publicly
available despite efforts by Cohn biographers and others over the years.”

Cohn’s background and the earlier parts of his career serve as a useful window
into how the world of “above-board” and “legitimate” business and politics has
intermingled with the criminal underworld throughout the decades and how
blackmail was critical to Cohn’s ability to successfully navigate those murky, grey
areas between the legal and the illegal.

AL COHN AND THE NEW YORK MACHINE

Ry Cohn’s father, Albert Cohn, was the son of immigrants from Poland,
hose limited financial means forced Albert to skip high school. He
eventually attended City College, working his way through university, and
graduated in 1903. Afterwards, he attended New York Law School, teaching high
school classes simultaneously, and became a practicing lawyer in 1908.2 In 1910,
Albert Cohn became heavily involved in the Democratic Party clubhouses based
in the Bronx, which involved “attending the once-a-week meetings, working the
precincts and winning the district leader’s favor,’ according to Roy Cohn
biographer Nicholas von Hoffman. Albert’s connections to the Bronx Democrats
grew strong enough that he was appointed assistant district attorney for the Bronx
by 1917.2 At this point, Albert or “Al” Cohn sought to become a judge but lacked
the money that was necessary to secure such a position. This was because the
party required payments from the men it put on the ballot as a form of
fundraising, and the more influential the position, the more money was required.
Cohn lacked such wealth but continued to ascend through the ranks of New
York's legal scene, becoming chief district attorney in 1923 under Bronx County
District Attorney Edward Glennon.

Around the time that Al Cohn had gone as far as he could without having the
money required for the judgeship he coveted, he met Dora Marcus, the daughter
of a wealthy banking family. According to friends of Al Cohn and members of the
Marcus family, the relationship between Cohn and Dora Marcus quickly led to an
arranged marriage, as Dora “was the ugly duckling daughter they couldn’t marry
off? According to interviews given by members of the Marcus family, which aired
in Matt Tyrnauer’s 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, Dora’s father Joseph
S. Marcus essentially offered Albert Cohn the money and influence necessary to

become a judge in exchange for his marrying Dora.4 They married in January
1924, and, a year later, Albert Cohn was appointed Bronx County judge by New
York governor Al Smith. After their marriage, Al and Dora argued about where to
live, with Al initially winning, securing their place in the Bronx. Al’s desire to stay
in the Bronx was motivated by his desire to stay connected to the political
connections he had developed, where he handled the party’s “Jewish patronage”
on behalf of Bronx party boss Ed Flynn.2 Al Cohn is regarded as a protégé of
Flynn's who came to wield “substantial power in the Democratic Party,’ according
to author Robert Shogan.12

In 1921, Cohn created the Pontiac Democratic Club at Flynn’s behest in order
to weaken the political base of a Flynn rival, Patrick Kane.4 The club later became
hugely influential in local elections. Years later, Roy Cohn would describe his
father as Flynn's “chief lieutenant” during this period while his mother Dora
would host annual dinner parties at their home in Flynn's honor. As a judge, Al
Cohn was incredibly loyal to Flynn and the Democratic Party. According to
historian Christopher Elias, “When the party needed Al to rule a certain way for
reasons political or personal, he followed through. When they needed his support
for a specific candidate, he gave it. When the son of a friend and fellow
Democratic operative killed a young woman in an automobile accident, Al made a
late-night visit to the police station and ‘straightened it out’”2

Al's service to the party and to Flynn paid off, with New York governor
Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointing Cohn to the Bronx Supreme Court in
1929, making him Roosevelt’s first judicial appointment.1* At the time and for
years afterward, Flynn was one of Roosevelt’s most senior strategists. Eight years
later, Albert Cohn was appointed to the State Supreme Court’s Appellate
Division.* Like many of the networks already explored in this book, the political
machine in which Al Cohn was intimately nestled was interwoven with the city’s
criminal underworld.

Some modern-day mainstream sources trace the origin of organized crime’s
influence on New York’s Democratic Party to 1931 when Lucky Luciano sent two
hired guns to intimidate Harry Perry, the co-leader of Manhattan’s 2nd Assembly
District, demanding he step down in favor of Albert Marinelli+® However, the
same crime syndicate had cozy ties with labor unions, a key component of the
Democratic Party’s power base, going back to the 1920s - an arrangement for
which mobster Arnold Rothstein is credited.+°

Similarly, Marinelli’s ties to the mob also dated back to the 1920s, when he
owned a trucking company that Lucky Luciano managed during the Prohibition
era. Luciano had been responsible for helping Marinelli become the first Italian-
American district leader at Tammany Hall well before the incident with Perry,
which speaks to organized crime’s earlier influence over New York politics
through Tammany. Yet, after Perry stepped aside and ceded his position to
Marinelli, the National Crime Syndicate’s influence on New York City politics,
particularly the Democratic Party, became “brazen,” according to decades-old
reports in New York magazine, as the move gave Marinelli — and by proxy, Luciano
— control over who was chosen to serve on grand juries as well as the counting of
votes in local elections.

The influence of the National Crime Syndicate on top New York politicians
was considerable at the time when Albert Cohn was deeply involved in
Democratic affairs. For instance, Meyer Lansky is known to have donated to the
political campaigns of Al Smith, the governor of New York for much of the
1920s.+8 Smith was a top figure with Tammany Hall, the political powerhouse of
New York Democratic politics that controlled Democratic Party nominations and
became synonymous with corruption. Smith is regarded as one of the main
protégés of Tammany boss Charles M. Murphy, who had worked to improve the
organizations reputation until his death in 1924. However, Murphy’s success in
cleaning up Tammany’s public image did not extend long past his death, largely
because many of the top names at the organization had remained closely
enmeshed with the city’s criminal underworld despite his efforts.

During the now-infamous effort of the National Crime Syndicate to rig the
Democratic National Convention in 1932 in favor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it
was a tearful Al Smith, who had personally warned Luciano, Lansky, and Costello
that Roosevelt would betray them.2 Smith specifically warned that Roosevelt
would break his promise to restrain an official inquiry into criminal activity in
New York City, a promise Roosevelt had made to appease organized criminal
interests in order to secure his nomination. This anecdote was relayed separately
by both Lansky and Luciano? Smiths warning, which the crime bosses had
ignored, turned out to be true, as Roosevelt allowed the inquiry, led by Judge
Samuel Seabury, to advance after his nomination was cemented. The inquiry soon
exposed extensive criminal activity being conducted by Tammany politicians,
leading several top officials to resign. Jimmy Walker, the Tammany-backed mayor

of New York City and Al Smith’s own protégé, not only resigned as mayor but fled
to Paris to avoid charges.

Regarding the 1932 convention, Luciano later stated that it was commonly
known at the time that his criminal enterprise controlled most of New York City’s
delegates to the convention, which speaks to their considerable influence over the
party’s dealings in the city during that period. Seabury and Roosevelt’s
combined determination to clean up the Democratic Party’s image in New York,
however, saw Tammany’s influence wane due to its entrenched association with
organized crime becoming public knowledge. The National Crime Syndicate’s
influence on New York politics nevertheless remained strong well past Tammany’s
fall from grace.

The elder Cohn remained deeply involved in the Democratic political
apparatus during this period and, as mentioned, was specifically close to Edward
Flynn, who had tightly controlled the Democratic Party in the Bronx since 1922.
Flynn, who was another protégé of Tammany Hall boss Charles Murphy but not a
Tammany member himself, became favored by Roosevelt in the wake of the
Seabury inquiry, supposedly because Flynn had kept his district free of
corruption.” An argument can be made, however, that Flynn had merely kept his
district and his own reputation free from a public association with corruption, as
Flynn later moved to protect the mob-linked politician William O’Dwyer.
According to Robert Shogan, O’Dwyer was one of the Cohn family’s “famous
family friends.’4

The rise of William O’ Dwyer, not unlike that of Thomas Dewey, was based on
his reputation as a crusader against organized crime, including Meyer Lansky’s
Murder Inc., and specifically his role in the takedown of syndicate boss Louis
“Lepke” Buchalter. It has been disputed, however, as to whether the reality of the
Buchalter case was the same as what was publicly reported (i.e., ex-cop O’Dwyer
bravely taking on the mob) or, rather, the masking of the consolidation of mob
power into fewer hands.

As noted by Sally Denton and Roger Morris in The Money and the Power, it
was Lansky himself who had arranged for Buchalter to be arrested by the FBI and
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1937. Of this alliance, Denton and Morris write
that the “betrayal [of Buchalter] at once removed a Lansky rival, gratified Hoover
and FBN director Harry Anslinger in their mutual obsession with popular image,
and further compromised federal law enforcement, which was growing ever more

dependent on informers and double agents for its successes”? Both Dewey and
O’Dwyer prosecuted Buchalter with great zeal, gaining considerable recognition
for themselves in the process. The man they took down, however, had already
been consigned to death by both his “friends” and the government before Dewey
and O’Dwyer were even involved, which casts doubt on the narrative that
Buchalter’s prison sentences and eventual death sentence were merely the result of
Dewey's and O’Dwyer’s prosecutorial abilities.

Further doubt regarding the official story of this incident is raised when one
considers that both star prosecutors had their own ties to the same syndicate, with
Dewey's ties to Mary Carter Paint/Resorts International having already been
noted in Chapter 1. In the case of O’Dwyer, he was meeting with Frank Costello
the same year that he secured Buchalter’s death sentence. O’Dwyer ran for
mayor of New York in 1941 and lost, but he was later elected in 1945, largely on
his anticorruption public image. However, an investigation launched by an
attorney O’Dwyer had once hired and who was successfully elected to O’Dwyer’s
old position as Brooklyn District Attorney, Miles McDonald, brought that image —
and O’Dwyer's career — crashing down. In 1950, McDonald began investigating
Harry Gross, who had been running a multi-million-dollar gambling empire in the
city. The investigation into Gross grew rapidly with McDonald discovering a series
of other related rackets throughout the city. Most of those rackets led back to one
man, James Moran — the man who had served as O’Dwyer’s right-hand man when
O’Dwyer served as a judge, as a district attorney, and now as the city’s mayor.

Once word got out that McDonald was onto Moran, heat started to be applied
from the very top, with O’Dwyer denouncing the man he had once hired and
calling his investigation a “witch hunt”? Soon afterward, Ed Flynn called
President Harry Truman and urgently requested a meeting. No formal record of
the meeting exists, but it is believed that the topic was the implications that
McDonald's investigation would have, not just for New York City but for the
Democratic Party and Truman himself. Two days later, Truman met with the head
of New York’s Democratic Party and a close associate of Flynn's, Paul Fitzpatrick.
He then met with Eleanor Roosevelt, whose influence on the New York
Democratic Party was still considerable. According to journalist David Samuels:

What McDonald's investigation would reveal, Flynn and Fitzpatrick knew, was that Mayor
O’Dwyer was the frontman for a system of citywide corruption that was administered by
Moran, the mayor's closest political associate. Worse, they knew - as the public would find out
the following August, from the public testimony of a gangster named Irving Sherman — that

O’Dwyer and Moran had been meeting personally with the syndicate boss Frank Costello as far
back as 1941. And as a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Flynn also
knew that the urban political operations that had helped elect Franklin Roosevelt to the
presidency four times, and Truman once, were based on a system of unsavory alliances. Putting
O’Dwyer on the stand would put the Democratic Party in New York — and elsewhere — on trial.
One way to keep O’Dwyer safe from McDonald’s grand jury was to get him out of the

country.22

This is precisely what happened, as Truman appointed O’Dwyer to be
ambassador to Mexico, which allowed O’Dwyer to avoid charges and further
scrutiny. Ed Flynn's close ally and accomplice in helping orchestrate this deal to
protect O’Dwyer, Paul Fitzpatrick, thanked Truman in a letter: “Your recent
announcement of the pending appointment of the Ambassador to Mexico, again
proves to me your deep understanding of many problems and your kindness in
rendering assistance. ... May I just say thanks.”22

Though O’Dwyer had escaped from McDonald's investigation, he was forced
to return to the US from Mexico City to testify before the Kefauver Committee on
his alleged dealings with organized crime in March 1951. During his testimony, he
did not deny having visited Frank Costello's home in 1941. He also admitted that
he had appointed the friends and relatives of powerful mobsters to public offices
and became evasive when asked how much he had known about their ties to
organized crime at the time. A subsequent report issued by the committee stated
that “during Mr. O’Dwyer’s term of office as district attorney of Kings County
between 1940 and 1942, and his occupancy of the mayoralty from 1946 to 1950,
neither he nor his appointees took any effective action against the top echelons of
the gambling, narcotics, water-front, murder, or book-making rackets,’ while his
time as mayor had “contributed to the growth of organized crime, racketeering,
and gangsterism in New York City7%

Less than a year later, O’ Dwyer’s right-hand man, James Moran, was convicted
on twenty-three counts of extortion for his role in the corruption McDonald had
exposed. If Flynn was indeed a Bronx political boss who was free of scandal and
corruption as some historians claim, it is hard to justify why he would intervene so
dramatically — directly involving the White House - in order to protect the
corruption that had enabled O’Dwyer. Rather, he stepped in to protect the system
of “unsavory alliances” that had given his party its power, including its obvious
organized crime ties. There is also the fact that a young Roy Cohn had been
considerably involved with and worked in O’Dwyer's election campaign, bragging

that he had been the one who had found dirt on O’Dwyer’s Republican
challenger. The mob connections and the use of “dirt” and blackmail in politics
is something that would later define much of Roy Cohn’ career and, ultimately,
his legacy.

UNCLE BERNIE’S BANK

hough Roy Cohn was undeniably born into privilege given his father’s

influence and connections, it can easily be argued that much of Albert Cohn’s
own success and clout had been due to marrying into the Marcus family. Roy
Cohn’s mother, Dora Marcus, hailed from an elite family in New York's Jewish
community that was later mired in controversy and scandal in connection with
their Wall Street activities during the Great Depression.

Dorothy “Dora” Marcus was the daughter of Joseph S. Marcus, who had
created the Bank of the United States. Marcus, a Russian-Jewish immigrant,
started his career in the garment industry before entering the world of banking,
first creating the Public Bank of New York in 1906. He disposed of his interest in
that bank in 1912 and chartered the Bank of the United States a year later. One of
Marcus’ reasons for doing so was apparently related to problems at the Public
Bank that had resulted from Marcus’ hiring of William Koelsch as cashier.
Koelsch’s presence at the bank caused “friction” among the bank’s directors,
according to the New York Times.

Marcus, Koelsch, and a business partner of Marcus’ named Saul Singer came
together to create the Bank of the United States soon afterward, but they had
different men officially file the bank’s incorporation. This was allegedly done in
order to hide their involvement to avoid alerting Public Bank's leadership that
Marcus and Koelsch were the real forces behind their new competitor. Marcus’
new bank was the subject of immediate controversy, as his new for-profit
enterprise was to be located just a stone’s throw from Public Bank, leading Public
Bank's leadership to complain that “there was no public necessity for such
additional banking facilities in that particular block” of the street.

In addition, Public Bank leadership objected to the name of Marcus’ new
bank, arguing that the name “Bank of the United States” sounded too much like
some historical government-linked institutions, such as that which had served as a
prototype for a central bank during the days of President Andrew Jackson. ‘This,

they argued, could give the false impression of a direct US government
connection to Marcus’ bank, particularly to the uninformed. This point was made
explicit in a letter written on behalf of Public Bank by Samuel I. Frankenstein and
sent to the Senate Banking Committee.

Frankenstein, according to a report on the letter published by the New York
Times, argued that “ignorant foreigners ... would believe that the United States
Government was interested in this bank and that it was a branch of the United
States Treasury in Washington, and if the bank should fail these poor depositors
would bewail the fact that they had entrusted their scant savings to the United
States government” He added, “It must be evident to any impartial mind that
the motive and purpose in selecting this very peculiar and misleading name for a
bank to be located in a neighborhood almost exclusively inhabited by foreigners,
especially when so many other appropriate names could have been so easily
adopted, was not a laudable one. This name was not selected through pure
accident”3 TIME would prove Frankenstein very prescient.

Despite these concerns, the Bank of the United States was granted its charter
by George C. Van Tuyl Jr., NY State Superintendent of Banks, who subsequently
became become a vice president and later a director of the bank. The Bank of the
United States, as Frankenstein had expected, immediately worked to attract
business and deposits from the local Jewish immigrant community. Starting with a
modest $100,000 in working capital, it experienced moderate growth and had a
total of five branches by 1925. Given its Jewish ownership and efforts to cater
directly to Jews, it became a point of pride for the New York Jewish community,
which “eagerly embraced the new bank, opening savings accounts and borrowing
money for fledgling businesses,” according to historian Beth S. Wenger.*4

Legal proceedings were, however, filed against the bank in 1926, requiring an
independent examination of the bank’s books. The case was dismissed by NY
State Supreme Court judge Joseph S. Proskauer, allegedly because the plaintiffs
had failed to “make out a case”38 Yet, there are reasons to doubts Proskauer’s
objectivity in the case, as he was connected to the same political machine as
Albert Cohn. For instance, Proskauer had been appointed by New York governor
Al Smith, whose ties to organized crime have already been discussed. Proskauer
had also served as Smith's key political advisor during campaigns bankrolled by
Lansky, which took place while Proskauer served on the NY State Supreme Court
and subsequently the Appellate Court. Proskauer was appointed chair of the New

York State Crime Commission in the early 1950s, despite his past conflicts of
interest.22

That commission had been created at the behest of Governor Thomas Dewey,
who, as mentioned in Chapter 1, had released Lucky Luciano from prison after his
involvement in Operation Underworld and who was also closely tied to both John
Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles was serving as CIA director at the
time of the commission’s activities and as the Agency's ties to organized crime
deepened. Soon after the Crime Commission’s work was completed, Dewey’s
former chief assistant, Paul Lockwood, in 1955 became a top executive at Lewis
Rosenstiel’s moblinked Schenley Industries, while Dewey himself officially
became a business associate of Lansky frontmen in 1958.42 Lansky had also
previously donated to Dewey’s unsuccessful bid for the US presidency in 1944.4
The Proskauer-led Crime Commission was insignificant in terms of its end results,
especially in comparison to the impact the Kefauver Committee had had the year
before, when Dewey had been called to testify due to his suspected mob ties.42
This suggests that Proskauer, like Albert Cohn, Ed Flynn and others, could be
counted on to protect certain influential actors within the system of “unsavory
alliances” that was woven throughout the city.

In addition to Proskauer’s own apparent conflicts of interest, there is the
added fact that Joseph Marcus had promised Albert Cohn a judgeship in exchange
for his marrying his daughter Dora, which further reveals the influence of the
Marcus family within legal and judicial circles, as well as with the politicians who
appointed judges in New York during this period. Albert Cohn had been
appointed as judge for Bronx County by Al Smith a year before this case was
brought against Marcus’ bank, in 1925.8

Joseph Marcus died in 1927, giving his son Bernard K. Marcus — Roy Cohn’s
“Uncle Bernie” — complete control over the bank’s affairs.** Bernard Marcus had
already been intimately involved with the bank's leadership since 1919, when his
father had turned over active management of the bank to him. After his father’s
death, Bernard was named president of the bank and went on an aggressive
acquisitions-and-mergers spree, resulting in the bank growing from five branches
in 1925 to sixty two in 1930.42 Two major mergers took place in 1928 followed by
two more in 1929, resulting in the Bank of the United States becoming the third-
largest bank in New York City by May 1929.4° The bank became a member of the
Federal Reserve of New York, which was greatly influenced by the Warburg

brothers, Felix and Paul. Paul Warburg was the main architect of the privately
owned Federal Reserve banking system and a powerful force at the central bank
during its early years.*4

Due to the Bank of the United States’ apparent success, Bernard was hailed at
the time as “a financial wizard who could make dividends sprout from virtually
nothing.”*8 Yet, it was soon revealed that Bernard Marcus’ wizardry was largely the
result of fraud and corruption by the Marcuses and Saul Singer, validating the
earlier rationale for having the bank investigated, which had been dismissed by
Proskauer. In February 1930, just months after the Black Tuesday stock market
crash of October 1929, Bernard Marcus assured shareholders that the bank stood
on solid ground.* A few months later, the bank began negotiations for its largest
merger yet, which would have resulted in their bank managing $1 billion in
deposits. The would-be bank was to have been headed by J. Herbert Case, then
head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, of which the Marcus-run bank was
a member.2 In addition, Goldman Sachs was poised to have “a substantial
interest” in the new bank, further underscoring that the merger was set to create
another Wall Street behemoth.* Terms of the merger were reportedly negotiated
in November 1929.52

Yet, by December, rumors were proliferating that the Marcus-run bank was
insolvent. Nervous investors and depositors, most of whom were Jewish, lined up
to withdraw their money on December 10, 1930. By midday, over $2 million had
been withdrawn, and tens of thousands of the bank’s estimated four hundred
thousand clients had gathered outside the doors of the bank’s Bronx branch,
leading to the police being called to maintain order. The panic quickly spread to
other branches, but — by that time — all of the other branches had closed their
doors. A massive sell-off of the bank’s stock ensued, plunging it to $3 a share,
whereas it had stood at $91 the previous year. Bernard Marcus insisted that the
bank would reopen following the planned merger. The merger, however, fell
through, as clearinghouse banks involved in the deal pulled out after examining
the books of the Marcus-run bank.

Superintendent of Banks Joseph Broderick attempted to work with Wall
Street’s leading bankers to rescue the bank on December 11, 1930, but failed to
reach any solution. The governor of New York at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
ordered the Bank of the United States closed, which made its failure the largest in

US history at the time. An investigation was launched, and the evidence of fraud
quickly piled up.

As the investigation began, it became readily apparent that Bernard Marcus
and Saul Singer, the bank’s vice president, had engaged in illegal activity, including
‘daha re the bank’s stock with depositor funds in order to drive up the stock
price.** Not only that, but they loaned out over $37 million under suspicious
circumstances, including $10 million in mostly unsecured loans to bank directors
and their companies, as well as $5.5 million in loans to sixteen insolvent
subsidiaries of the bank in the months leading up to its collapse*+ Marcus and
Singer also raided the bank’s reserve to finance their own investments in the real
estate market.

Public hearings revealed that two months before the bank shut down, officers
at the bank had burned a truckload of documents, more than a thousand bundles
of papers of bank records, at an incinerator located at the Beresford Apartments,
which was owned by a subsidiary of the Bank of the United States. Marcus, in a
style that would later be exemplified by his nephew Roy Cohn, fought the
investigation of his bank bitterly, even going so far as - refuse to testify and to
seek the removal of the lead investigator of the case°° Both Marcus and Singer
were found guilty of fraud and were sentenced to three years in Sing Sing
maximum-security prison, and their appeal was unsuccessful.

According to members of the Marcus family, including Roy’s mother Dora,
the reason the other banking chieftains of New York had declined to step in to
rescue the Bank of the United States had been bees esa and editorials
appeared in some New York newspapers arguing the same.“ Per this theory, the
Episcopalian J. P. Morgan, the Anglo-Saxon-dominated New York Clearing
House, and the German-Jewish bankers — e.g. the Kuhns, Loebs, and Lehmans —
had let the Russian-Jewish bankers fail when they could have saved their bank.
Dora Marcus referred to these figures as “a dirty anti-Semitic cabal” that sought to
destroy her family due to their Russian-Jewish origins.*8

Other banks, however, have been allowed to fail throughout US history, and
“anti-Semitism” was not blamed for those occurrences. In addition, the German-
Jewish banking establishment was in part dominated by another powerful family —
the Warburgs — with both Felix and Paul Warburg having married into another
German-Jewish banking family, the Loebs. In June 1930, just months before the
collapse of the Marcus-owned bank, Albert Cohn — Bernard Marcus’ brother-in-

law — was the guest of honor at a luncheon hosted by Felix Warburg, suggesting
that this alleged hatred held by the German-Jewish banking establishment for the
Russian-Jewish Marcus family did not exist at the time.°2

It is perhaps more likely that either the fraud of the Bank of the United States
was too enormous or that the German-Jewish banking establishment was
disgruntled that such a massive fraud had been perpetrated by a Jewish-owned
bank against mostly Jewish depositors. After all, the bank sought to target the
Jewish immigrant community through deceptive means from its inception and
subsequently committed fraud to rob mostly Jewish immigrants of their money.
For example, the bank deliberately advertised its services to the Jewish
community in Jewish newspapers and magazines less than a year before its failure
at a time when its executives had been engaged in fraudulent activity? In
addition, there had been efforts to investigate the bank for fraud earlier, but they
had been dismissed with the intervention of Judge Proskauer. That intervention
also raises the possibility that powerful interests had been willing to intervene on
behalf of the Marcus-owned bank once but would not do so a second time.

Furthermore, Bernard Marcus was pardoned after just twenty-seven months
in prison by Herbert Lehman when he was serving as New York governor.®4
Lehman had been one of the judges presiding over Marcus’ appeal and was the
only one who had argued for the conviction to be overturned.®* Lehman, who
hailed from the German-Jewish Lehman Brothers banking family, was close to
Albert Cohn, who had allegedly lobbied Lehman to grant the pardon.® If the
Lehmans and the rest of the German-Jewish banking establishment had indeed
sought to destroy Marcus, it is highly unlikely that Herbert Lehman would have
intervened to try to prevent his initial conviction and then intervened again by
pardoning Marcus.

The trial and imprisonment of Bernard Marcus had a considerable impact on
Roy Cohn, as “Bernie” was his favorite uncle. Roy, like other members of the
Marcus family, took the view that the “anti-Semitic cabal” had used Bernard
Marcus as a “scapegoat,” leading some of his cousins on the Marcus side to claim
that it was this view that led Cohn to “fight the establishment.” Given other
accounts and insights into Roy Cohn’s up-bringing, it seems more likely that he
just resented the law and felt that it should not apply to him, a sentiment
apparently shared by Bernard Marcus, as revealed by his conduct during the

investigation and trial related to his role as the president of the Bank of the United
States.

On Roy Cohn’s maternal side, it was not only his grandfather and uncle who
were influential figures in New York (despite their very public fall from grace in
the 1930s). His maternal grandmother, Celia Cohen Marcus, was the sister of
Joshua Lionel Cowen (born Cohen), who cofounded Lionel Corporation, a
producer of model railroads and toy trains. The origins of the prominent toy
company lie in Cowen’s work for Acme Electric Light company, where he began
registering patents for lamps and motors in 1899.95 That same year, Cowen was
awarded a $12,000 contract from the US Navy to design and manufacture fuses to
ignite submarine mines. Cowen used the money to finance the creation of
Lionel Corporation in 1900. Though Cowen is best known as the long-time and
founding president of Lionel Corporation, he was also a director of the Bank of
United States at the time of its demise.

While his nephew was sent to Sing Sing, Cowen managed to get off light
through the help of Fred Piderit, the special deputy banking superintendent
charged with overseeing the liquidation of the Bank of the United States.®®
Piderit’s son later became a prominent fixture at the New York Federal Reserve.
Cowen ultimately settled for $5,000 (about $107,000 in 2022 dollars), despite
having personally attended bank directors’ meetings during which many of the
fraudulent loans had been approved. He testified that he knew nothing of the
bank’s criminal activities and learned about its many problems from media reports
after its closure. Cowen’s avoidance of charges in the case further weakens the
theory that the prosecution of Bernard Marcus over the bank’s collapse was a plot
against the Marcus family perpetrated by other Jewish banking families.

Lionel'’s influence grew and peaked in the early 1950s when it became the
world’s largest toy manufacturer-2 Its glory days faded relatively quickly, and by
the end of decade, Cowen and his son Lawrence stepped away from the company,
selling their shares to none other than Roy Cohn. Cohn’s involvement with and
role at the company would subsequently be linked to suspect financial activity and
organized crime networks. Friends of Cohn’s, including former congressman Neil
Gallagher, have alleged that Roy persuaded friends and acquaintances to buy
Lionel stock while he privately shorted the firm, resulting in Cohn getting rich
while those who had invested at his behest took a financial beating.“ Cohn also
“side-stepped” federal regulations in the late 1950s by borrowing large sums from

US and foreign sources to buy Lionel stock.“ At the time, Cohn had already
become enmeshed in business interests tied to mob figures such as Moe Dalitz
and Tony Salerno.

Regarding other notable claims about Roy Cohn’s family tree, it has been
alleged by some, including his biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, that his
maternal grandmother, Celia Cohen Marcus, was “deranged,” suffering from
serious mental issues. One of his uncles on his mother’s side, Jesse Marcus, was
“either mentally retarded or brain-damaged,’ which the family speculated was due
to the misuse of forceps by the doctor who delivered him, while others suspected
a congenital condition. Von Hoffman also reported that some members of the
Cohn family thought that Roy Cohn’s mother needed to be institutionalized,
while others thought something similar but believed that being well-to-do made
her eccentricities manageable.

Other members of the Marcus family, including Roy Cohn’s cousins, have not
made such extreme claims but have said that Dora's neurotic and sociopathic
tendencies left an undeniable mark on her son. According to one of his cousins, it
all started the day Roy Cohn was born in 1927, with Dora telling Al, “This is my
baby. I’m going to bring this child up and you're going to have nothing to say
about it.’ Though dominated by his mother and having much less contact with
his father, Cohn was aware from a young age of their unhappy marriage and was
able to play his parents against each other with ease. Bernard Marcus’ wife, Libby
Marcus, once stated to biographer von Hoffman that Cohn’s parents “saw quite
differently in ways of discipline and so forth, so Roy was never said no to. He
could always find one person on his side, and that’s the one he would use.” Cohn’s
Aunt Libby, added, “I don’t think there was any [discipline] between Roy and his
mother. It was always in a direction of power, influence, recognition, and there was
no chance of Roy ever being stymied because he always, always got his way.... It
was not a normal relationship.”

This permissiveness was, perhaps, the most lasting impact Cohn’s mother had
on his character. It was also expressed by one of his law partners, who was
anonymously cited by von Hoffman as saying, “His doting mother created a
person who was totally free of the rules that you and I or most people go by. What
will people think, what’s the right thing, what does my religion say about this —
Roy played by his own set of rules. Whatever he wanted at any given moment was
the right thing”

Roy RISING

rom a young age, Roy Cohn was known for being adept at “the trade of

human calculus, of deal making, swapping, maneuver, and manipulation.”
By the time he was twelve, for example, he was using his father’s political
connections to secure men jobs at the post office, collecting a finder’s fee. Those
who knew him all agree that he felt more comfortable in the presence of powerful
businessmen and New York political power-brokers than with children his own
age. Despite being so different from other children, Roy Cohn developed a few
close childhood friends, some of whom would dramatically impact his career
trajectory as well as his later ability to manipulate the media for political gain and
for the gain of his clients.

These childhood pals of Cohn’s included Si Newhouse Jr., who went on to
oversee the Conde Nast empire that now includes Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, the New
Yorker, and many other publications; Edwin Weisel Jr., who became assistant
attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson and whose father was a
prominent lawyer in the movie business; and Generoso (Gene) Pope Jr., who
eventually ran the National Enquirer. Cohn’s Aunt Libby Marcus stated that Roy
“had very few contemporary friends, because even as a little boy, if he had a party
there would be two youngsters, Generoso Pope [ Jr.] and Eddie Weisel, Jr. — those
were his two friends. Every time he had a party, he had these two contemporaries
and everybody else was somebody in politics or somebody with power. Older. He
didn’t bother too much [with] people his own age.”

Gene, like Roy, had an insatiable interest in politics and, more specifically, the
politics of power. He was the favorite son of Generoso Pope Sr., an immigrant who
had famously come to the US from Italy essentially penniless and who had risen to
the top of New York City’s — and then the nation’s — concrete industry. Pope Sr.
was a controversial man at the time due to his admiration and support for Italian
fascism and his ties to Benito Mussolini as well as the Vatican and New York's top
mobsters. Pope Sr. was also close to William O’Dwyer, the mob-linked mayor of
New York who was also a friend to the Cohn family. Pope Sr. also had the ear of
prominent US politicians, including Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Harry Truman as well as Truman's Republican challenger and governor of
New York, Thomas Dewey.

Regarding the family’s mob ties, Pope Sr. was particularly close to Frank
Costello, who he had known since his earliest days in New York and who had
shaped the trajectory of his business, Colonial Sand and Stone, by securing the
most lucrative city contracts for concrete for Pope’s company.®2 The seemingly
endless series of sweetheart deals led Colonial to become the largest concrete
company in the country and allowed Pope Sr., its head, to become one of the
wealthiest, “legitimate” businessmen with intimate organized crime ties.

So close was the tie that Costello — who was the real-life inspiration for Vito
Corleone, the main character of the famous Mario Puzo novel The Godfather — was
chosen to be Gene Pope Jr's actual godfather and served as his guide for years.
Gene, after a brief stint working in psychological operations for the CIA, got a
loan from Costello to construct his own media empire around the National
Enquirer. Gene Pope Jrs son, Paul Pope, described Costello's influence on his
family as “like a guardian angel, his power felt but unseen” &

The mafioso-style “deals” that brought the Pope family to prominence also
became their modus operandi. Through his control of the city’s concrete industry
and the local Italian immigrant voting bloc through his essential monopoly on
Italian-language newspapers in New York, Pope was a force that major politicians,
and any ambitious politician, could not afford to ignore. He operated through an
elaborate system of quid pro quo that was later adopted by Roy Cohn, who called
his own version of this system his “favor bank.”8* As Gene Pope Jr. later said of
both his and his father’s roles in New York — and even national — politics: “We
made deals. That’s how judges got made, DAs, things like that. That’s when you
did all your talking. I mean I did everything from fixing parking tickets to making
judges.”85

Cohn, later on in life, reminisced about his closeness to the Pope family,
stating that “virtually every Saturday night, we would go out to dinner or have
dinner at 1040 Fifth and then Mr. and Mrs. Pope, Gene and I would go see a new
Broadway show% According to Gene Pope Jr. and Cohn, Gene Pope Sr. served as
a “mentor” to Cohn, whom he admired for his “magnetic personality.’ Cohn later
said that he “learned an awful lot about practical politics” from Pope Sr., including
the politics of the “favor bank,” and that the mob-linked businessman “had more
to do with my incipient political career than any other single person.”®>

Pope Sr. certainly aided Cohn’s rise in the world of lawfare, having pulled
strings to secure the appointment of Irving Saypol as US Attorney for the

Southern District of New York (SDNY), where Cohn subsequently served as
assistant attorney. According to Cohn, as cited by his biographer Nicholas von
Hoffman, Saypol’s appointment as US Attorney was “thanks to the influence of an
odoriferous triumvirate” of Pope Sr., Carmine de Sapio of Tammany Hall, and
Frank Costello.®® Saypol’s focus on prosecuting Communists led to Cohn’s now
infamous role in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and, shortly thereafter, the
McCarthy hearings.

It was Roy Cohn’s oddly cozy relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, described in
Chapter 2, that was the deciding factor in Cohn’s appointment as Joe McCarthy’s
chief counsel during the controversial anti-Communist hearings. The position had
nearly gone to Robert F. Kennedy, who was a lifelong rival and bitter enemy of
Cohn’s — with Kennedy attempting to nail Cohn on more than one occasion when
he was Attorney General during his brother’s presidency. Though Cohn was
ruthless and seemingly untouchable as McCarthy's counsel, having played a
pivotal role in destroying many careers and lives during the parallel “Red” and
“Lavender” scares, his antics in relation to his work on the committee eventually
led to his downfall after he attempted to blackmail the Army in return for
preferential treatment for committee consultant and his rumored lover, David
Schine. Notably, shortly before Schine became involved with Cohn and
McCarthy, his sister, Renee Schine, married Lester Crown, the future Mega
Group member and son of the “Supermob”linked Henry Crown discussed in
Chapter 1.87

While Cohn’s failed power play with the Army was his most well-known
attempt to use blackmail during this period, he was also known to have used
blackmail of various sorts to target diplomats, such as Charles Thayer, the US
consul general in Munich, Germany, after Thayer’s brother-in-law, Charles Bohlen,
was nominated for an ambassadorship by Eisenhower. Both Thayer, but especially
Bohlen, were hated by the “McCarthyite right” despite there being no solid
evidence of communist affiliations in either case. Cohn had learned that, during
a stint in Mexico, Thayer had produced a son with a Mexican woman whom he
had briefly married and then divorced. Cohn threatened to inform Thayer's aged
mother of this long-past affair by shoehorning it into the public confirmation
hearings of Charles Bohlen, who had been nominated to serve as US ambassador
to the Soviet Union. Thayer, fearing that the news would greatly distress his

elderly mother, chose to resign from the State Department.®2

Cohn also likely used blackmail obtained by other means, given that he had
already become involved with the Rosenstiel-linked sexual-blackmail operation
during this period. As discussed in chapter 2, this operation was allegedly tied to
the anti-Communist “hunt” of the period, and its apparent target, homosexual
men, were also being “hunted” due to so-called lavender scare. Ironically, one of
the main motives behind the lavender scare was the concern that closeted
homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail. Though the idea was that Communists
would use this information to subvert homosexuals in the US government, the
evidence suggests that it was this specific anti-Communist group with which
Cohn was directly affiliated, who were more adept at blackmailing these men. This
group was also subversive, given that their top men, homosexuals such as Hoover
and Cohn, where entangled with and compromised by organized crime. After all,
it had been Hoover’s FBI and the Catholic Church, dominated by Cohn’s pal
Cardinal Spellman, that had originally backed and legitimized McCarthy and his
now infamous witch hunt.22

Like Hoover, Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York from 1939 until
his death in 1967, was incredibly powerful. As Gene Pope Jr., Roy Cohn’s lifelong
friend, later recalled: “You couldn't get a job in New York without Spellman’s okay.
... Before anybody had a Chinaman’s chance, it had to be cleared by Spellman....
He controlled everything with an iron fist, he controlled the legislature, he
controlled the city council. He controlled everything” Spellman was very much
a control freak, having been known to interpret “any sign of opposition to his will
as a sign of Communist subversion”? Also like Hoover, Spellman’s power was
likely the main reason why he was able to keep the facts about his homosexual life
under wraps. Spellman’s double life not only allegedly involved the “blue suite”
parties at the Plaza hotel, but also included private sex parties at his mansion. Even
Spellman biographer John Cooney had to acknowledge Spellman’ private life,
writing, “In New York’s clerical circles ... Spellman’s sex life was a source of
profound embarrassment.... There were stories about his seducing altar boys and
choir boys. He had his favorites among handsome young priests and was known
to have lovers outside the clergy”?

One interesting anecdote shared by Cooney relates to a choir boy who had a
relationship with Spellman and who was particularly vocal about it. A man named
C. A. Tripp, who later became a sex researcher for the controversial Alfred C.
Kinsey, stumbled on this relationship by accident after he met the choir boy, who

was bragging about his trysts with Spellman. Tripp was stunned that the powerful
Cardinal was not more discreet about his dealings. Tripp asked the boy to ask
Spellman why he was not worried that news would get out and harm his
reputation. The boy returned several days later and responded: “The archbishop
says, ‘Who would ever believe that? ”%

It seems that Spellman was confident that his powerful position would shield
him from any real scrutiny, allowing him to carry on his sex life as he saw fit. As
Rod Dreher of the American Conservative wrote in a 2019 article that detailed
various anecdotes about Spellman’s double life: “Cardinal Spellman was confident
that he would never be outed, and that if someone tried, no one would believe it.
And they wouldn't have, until today”? As previously noted, Spellman was alleged
to have been seen at the “blue suite” parties at the Plaza hotel.

While Spellman and Hoover apparently had similar, and potentially
connected, private lives that carried the risk of exposure, it seems that only the
latter was blackmailed. Such blackmail was not only wielded by organized crime
interests to protect their rackets from FBI meddling, but also by American
intelligence agencies. According to David Talbot in The Devils Chessboard,
McCarthy's efforts to target CIA analyst and CIA director Allen Dulles’ ally
William McBundy in mid-1953 led Dulles to put the squeeze on Hoover, who
(despite having expressed doubts about McCarthy’s campaign at this time)
continued to feed the Wisconsin senator and Roy Cohn “a stream of damaging
information on his [ Hoover’s] Washington enemies.”2°

Dulles, himself the subject of a thick dossier kept in Hoover's office that
documented his adulterous trysts, made sure the CIA maintained the blackmail
on Hoover, including that which had been shared between OSS veterans, most
likely James Jesus Angleton, and Meyer Lansky years earlier. As Talbot notes, “The
CIA counterintelligence chief |J. J. Angleton] was rumored to occasionally show
off photographic evidence of Hoover’s intimate relationship with FBI deputy
Clyde Tolson, including a photo of Hoover orally pleasuring his longtime aide and
companion,’ while one of Allen Dulles’ mistresses was known to refer to Hoover
as “the Virgin Mary in pants?”

Dulles had also compiled a lengthy dossier on Joe McCarthy’s sex life, which
included allegations of homosexuality. Talbot details those allegations:

The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government [i.e., McCarthy] was
widely rumored to haunt the ‘bird circuit’ near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways

in Milwaukee. Drew Pearson got wind of the stories but was never able to get enough proof to
run with them. But the less discriminating Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las
Vegas Sun, who was locked in an ugly war of words with McCarthy, let the allegations fly.
Greenspun had been given access to the Pearson files, and he had picked up his own McCarthy
stories involving young hotel bellboys and elevator operators during the senator’s gambling trips
to Vegas. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,’ wrote Greenspun. “He seldom dates girls and
if he does, he laughingly describes it as window dressing.... It is common talk among
homosexuals who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn [in Milwaukee] that Senator Joe

McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities”28

In the world of Beltway blackmail, these allegations of McCarthy's
homosexuality were dismissed by those in Hoover's inner circle, as Hoover had
also compiled his own set of secret files on McCarthy’s sex life, should he ever
need it. Instead, Hoover's secret files were alleged to contain a series of disturbing
stories of McCarthy drunkenly groping young girls, which was allegedly so
frequent that they had become “common knowledge” around the capital. Talbot
quotes Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, who
witnessed McCarthy molest one such girl, as saying, “He just couldn't keep his
hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on
him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know” +%

Yet, as previously discussed, it appears that the anti-Communist forces that
surrounded McCarthy, as opposed to the “Communist opposition,’ was the side
that most readily engaged in such operations, and it is entirely possible that
McCarthy could have been targeted and entrapped by some of his ostensible
allies, given that he wielded considerable power and his indiscretions were said to
have been widely known in those circles.

For Dulles’ part, he didn’t need to “plant a minor” on McCarthy, as the
compendium of stories of his actions alone was enough to give the CIA director
leverage over the senator. As a result, Talbot states, “there was an explosive sexual
subtext to the CIA’s power struggle with McCarthy, one that was largely hidden
from the public but would eventually erupt in the Senate hearings that brought
him down”! Though it is debatable as to whether McCarthy’s struggle with
Dulles provoked his undoing, their scuffle did mark his first major failure and was
a turning point in his anti-Communist campaign. It would be the relationship
between Roy Cohn and David Schine, the chief consultant to McCarthy’s
committee who has been described by one Cold War historian as Roy Cohn’s
“dumb blonde,’ that became the deciding factor behind both McCarthy's and

Cohn’s fall from grace.2* Though some Cohn biographers have cast doubt on the

claims of a romantic relationship between Cohn and Schine, other historians of
the period treat it as fact. There is really no way of knowing one way or the other,
aside from a series of anecdotes that have been the subject of speculation for, at
this point, several decades.

For instance, during Cohn’s and Schine’s infamous European tour, the
German press reported on the two men’s “flirtatious antics in a hotel lobby” while
also describing how the pair had left “their hotel room in a shambles after a
vigorous round of horseplay.”1°2 Von Hoffman, who dismisses a homosexual
relationship between Cohn and Schine in his book Citizen Cohn, nevertheless
notes some eyebrow-raising stories. One such story that had been reported in
TIME revolved around how Schine and Cohn “would fly down to Washington
from New York on Monday, take adjoining rooms at the Statler Hotel for the
week, then fly back on Friday night for a weekend of nightclubbing.” On one
occasion, the Statler did not have adjoining rooms for the two men, instead only
having two single rooms that were not connected. It was Schine, as opposed to
Cohn, who then provoked “quite a hassle in the lobby” as he “roared his
disapproval.’

At the very least, even if there was no sexual relationship, the evidence points
to Cohn having been enamored with Schine to the point that he was willing to
aim the full force of the McCarthy machine squarely at the Army after Schine,
who had been drafted in 1953, was due to be shipped overseas. Cohn’s reported
response to the news was, “We'll wreck the Army.... The Army will be ruined ... if
you pull a dirty, lousy, stinking, filthy, shitty double cross like that’12 The
targeting of the Army did lead to ruin, just not the Army’s.

Eventually, and with the full approval of the Eisenhower administration, the
Army responded by compiling “the Schine report,’ which revealed all of the ways
that Cohn and McCarthy had sought to blackmail the Army to secure special
privileges and favors on Schine’s behalf. This led to the now-infamous Army-
McCarthy hearings in 1954, which ultimately ended McCarthy's reign and
humiliated Cohn to such an extent that it would overshadow him for the rest of
his career, long after he left Washington. The intensity of the controversy would
also provoke the dissolution of the close relationship between Cohn and Schine.
What is undeniable about the whole affair is that it reveals how blackmail,
particularly sexual blackmail, had become a major, even if largely invisible, force in
American politics.

COHN UNDER FIRE

fter the end of McCarthyism, Roy Cohn returned to New York and, thanks to

Judge David Peck, joined the Saxe, Bacon & O’Shea law firm in 1957. Peck, a
close friend of Roy’s father, was also very closely associated with Thomas Dewey
and, prior to and after his judgeship, was a lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, the
Wall Street firm long run by the Dulles brothers.42° The firm, later renamed Saxe,
Bacon & Bolan, came to be dominated by Cohn, for better or for worse. One
lawyer who worked there in the early days alongside Cohn has accused him of
being the driving force behind the deterioration of its reputation, which declined
rapidly in the 1960s.+% Yet, despite the firm’s decline in professional reputation,
Roy was making quite a bit of money during this same period, as well as a name
for himself.

What could have been good times for Roy Cohn were marred by his ongoing
feud with the Kennedys, namely Robert F. Kennedy. “I knew when Bobby
Kennedy was lurking nearby, nothing good could happen to me,’ Cohn was
known to have said.128 He was particularly concerned after learning of John F.
Kennedy’s plans to run for president, as it would likely mean his “mortal enemy”
would be appointed to a powerful position in a future administration. Cohn had
done all he could to keep the Kennedys from power by vigorously supporting
Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primary” This involved him lobbying
Carmine de Sapio of New York’s Tammany Hall to back Johnson.

Yet, the Kennedys were not so easily thwarted, and once Robert Kennedy
became Attorney General, the feud became even more acrimonious and
particularly dangerous for Cohn. Cohn sought refuge in his powerful connections,
which now included even more overt ties to major figures in organized crime.
Indeed, the same year that John Kennedy won the presidential election, in 1960,
Cohn was the guest of honor at a New Year's Eve party hosted by Moe Dalitz, the
Ohio-based gangster who was a close associate of Meyer Lansky and a key figure
in the Jewish mob. This same year, Cohn had also begun engaging in illegal
financial schemes involving Lionel, his uncle’s company./2 Cohn’s control over
Lionel had been arranged with the help of Los Angeles accountant Eli Boyer, who
— along with Cohn - had invested in a project alongside Dalitz and his

associates HH

Cohn initially attempted to smooth things over with Kennedy, writing a letter
claiming he “harbored no ill will” toward him, a gesture that was ignored.
Former congressman Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher, who had met and befriended
Roy while representing him in a legal case, later remembered that “Roy was very
set back at the fact that Bobby was now named as Attorney General. He was, to
put it mildly, very disturbed. ... Roy felt, and rightfully so, that they were coming
after him. And in fact there was a Get-Roy-Cohn team put together and a Get-
Jimmy-Hoffa team put together” 13

The creation of the “Get-Roy-Cohn” team by the Robert Kennedy-led Justice
Department was attested to by Robert Arum, then Assistant US Attorney in New
York, while many others have noted the obvious personal hatred that helped fuel
Kennedy’s efforts to get Cohn. The combined hatred for Cohn shared by Robert
Kennedy and Robert Morgenthau, then the US Attorney in New York, resulted in
Cohn being taken to court three times over the next few years. He managed to
avoid being found guilty in all three cases, thanks to pure luck in at least one
instance.

The first case came in 1964, when a grand jury indictment charged Cohn with
obstruction of justice for having tried to prevent the indictment of four men in a
stock-swindle scheme involving a company called United Dye, as well as perjury
for having lied that he had done so. The case focused considerable attention on
Cohn’s dealings with Moe Dalitz and his associates, particularly those involved in
the Desert Inn (discussed in more detail later in this chapter).

During the trial, the allegation was made that Cohn had called Dalitz in June
1962, demanding that the mobster return immediately from a vacation in Europe
in order to assist Cohn in intimidating men tied to the United Dye swindle so they
would lie under oath to the grand jury investigating the scheme. It also emerged
during the case that Cohn, Dalitz, Eli Boyer, and stock swindler Sam Garfield (a
close friend of Dalitz’s and a central figure in the United Dye scandal) had all been
original investors, and thus business associates, in the Sunrise hospital, as had
Desert Inn manager Allard Roen, another figure in the United Dye case. Roen was
previously discussed in connection with Burton Kanter and the “supermob” in
chapter 1. Media reports on the case also noted that Cohn, as previously
mentioned, had been the guest of honor at Dalitz’s New Year’s Eve party in
1960.44

Other aspects of the United Dye case, which were ignored or merely glanced
over during the trial, are critical for establishing Cohn’s ties not just to organized
crime during this period but also to organized criminal activity that was intimately
enmeshed with a series of CIA assets and other figures of interest in the context of
this book. The United Dye web and its organized crime-intelligence links are
explored later in this chapter. For now, the focus will be on Cohn and how he
fared against the Kennedy-led Justice Department.

Cohn’s defense in the case was based on his assertion that the “two Bobbies” —
Kennedy and Morgenthau — were after him because of personal vendettas.*4* In
the case of Kennedy, it was because Cohn had beat him out to be counsel to Joe
McCarthy; for Morgenthau, it was because Cohn had helped target his father, the
former treasury secretary, during the McCarthy hearings. Though Cohn had
the formidable media empires of the Newhouse family and the Hearst
Corporation at his back, his ties to Hoover and Cardinal Spellman also proved
useful in this particular legal battle. Spellman’s ties to Cohn, writes von Hoffman,
were so well known throughout New York that it “enabl[ed] him to put the
connection to use in his lawyerly tricks” and served as “Roy’s insurance that there
would be some political constraints on what Bobby [Kennedy] might do” in his
quest to send Cohn to prison, in large part because of the Kennedys’ own Catholic
connections. Hoover was of more immediate assistance to Cohn at this time,
with a lawyer who worked alongside Cohn at Saxe, Bacon & O’Shea claiming that
Hoover “gave Roy the government's case, not directly but from FBI agents and
witnesses” H8

Yet, despite all this help, things were not going Cohn’s way in the trial, with a
single juror holding out for conviction. It later emerged that Cohn and his legal
team had done everything they could to have this juror, an African American
woman, replaced prior to deliberation, as they assumed that she would surely vote
to convict. Unfortunately for this woman juror, her father was killed in a car
accident during deliberation, and she was excused from the jury. The judge
reluctantly ruled a mistrial as a result of her dismissal.+2

When the case was retried, it resulted in acquittal. One of the main reasons for
this shift was that Cohn’s defense lawyer — Frank Raichle — had caught Sam
Garfield, a key government witness, in a lie related to his denial that the
government had offered him leniency for his role in the United Dye stock swindle

if he testified against Cohn. The optics helped Cohn’s “vendetta” defense.2" The

second trial Cohn faced, the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines case, saw him charged with
“bribery, conspiracy, extortion and blackmail for allegedly bribing a city appraiser
to help his client, Fifth Avenue Coach, snare a higher award in a pending
condemnation trial”? This trial had a very different trajectory than the United
Dye case, particularly when Cohn’s defense attorney Joseph Brill had a heart
attack in the middle of the case. Brill’s heart attack was suspected by some as
having been a ploy so that Cohn could serve as his own defense lawyer as the trial
drew to a close. While it is debatable if such suspicions were warranted, Cohn
becoming his own defense attorney allowed him to offer his own testimony
without being cross-examined. It also allowed him to offer “an eloquent seven-
hour summation, ending with a protestation of [Cohn’s] love for America” 22
That performance saw tears stream down the cheeks of both Cohn and the jurors,
who then acquitted Cohn.

The third trial was also related to the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines case and saw
Cohn accused of bribery, conspiracy, and filing false reports to the Securities and
Exchange Commission. The government’s case against Cohn in this instance
involved deposits that Cohn had arranged with the money Fifth Avenue Coach
received as a result of the condemnation award. One of those two deposits
arranged by Cohn, which the government asserted “provoked considerable
controversy,’ was a deposit of five hundred thousand dollars in Geoftrey’s Bank in
Belgium, which was made the same day that Fifth Coach received the award. One
hundred thousand of those funds were then sent to Cohn and deposited in his
personal bank account the next day.

Cohn testified that the money was a payment he was owed by A. Newman, “a
friend of Cohn’s with whom he had certain business dealings” and who was an
officer of Geoffrey’s Bank.* The other “mysterious” deposit made by Cohn was
“never fully explained,’ according to the judge who oversaw the case, despite
having been a key point of focus during the trial.42 Cohn was acquitted when the
government's strategy of offering former business associates of Cohn leniency for
testifying against him backfired yet again. Nevertheless, the acquittal came with
caveats, as the court did find that “Cohn benefitted from the use of Fifth’s money
to pay the loans made to him by” other directors and that he engaged in a “cover
up” of the involvement of two company directors in suspect financial schemes. +25

The appearance of “A. Newman,” or Arno Newman, in this case is worth
noting as Newman, who used the last name “Nejman” in Belgium, and his family

bank, named for Arno’s son Geoffrey, were later tied to illegal arms deals with
Israeli intelligence in the 1980s, during roughly the same period as the Iran-
Contra affair (see Chapter 7). Some of these deals, gone awry, bankrupted
Geoffrey’s Bank by 1981, but no legal consequences for the bankruptcy ever befell
the Newman/Nejman family.

A key figure in the Mossad-linked smuggling of weapons through Belgium at
this time was David Benelie, a Belgian-Israeli dual citizen and an official business
partner of the Nejman family. It later emerged that Benelie’s real last name was
Azulay and that he was the brother of Avner Azulay, who worked closely with
Marc Rich, a Mossad-connected commodity speculator and later fugitive. Belgian
investigative reporter Willy Van Damme has claimed that both Azulay brothers
worked for Mossad.”

While these were the three cases brought against Cohn by the “two Bobbies,”
they were not Cohn’s only trials during the period, as he was also indicted for
violating banking laws on more than one occasion. However, the conduct of the
two Bobbies, particularly that of Robert Morgenthau, in their quest to nail Cohn,
ultimately resulted in a flip of the narrative in which Cohn — once seen as an attack
dog in McCarthy’s witch hunt — now became viewed as a victim of a witch hunt
himself. There is some truth to that view, as Cohn’s mail had been illegally
intercepted during his 1964 trial, and stories that painted Cohn in a negative light
were leaked to the press by the government in a clear bid to sway jurors.

Yet, one of the motivating factors behind Kennedy’s and Morgenthau's efforts
to “get” Cohn, that he was a crooked lawyer with organized crime ties who felt
himself to be above the law, was also true. Nevertheless, despite their best efforts,
none of the cases stuck, and their failure granted Cohn “an aura of invincibility,
respectability, and even sympathy” +Z Though he had garnered some public
sympathy, that does not mean that Cohn did not try to get even with his arch
nemeses, particularly Bobby Kennedy.

VENDETIA BEGETS VENDETIA

ne of the many things that Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover shared was
having Robert Kennedy as an enemy. Hoover not only subverted the
Kennedy-led effort to “get” Roy Cohn by passing Cohn the government's case
against him on at least one occasion, he also looked for ways to bring Kennedy

down. This was not motivated by Kennedy’s efforts to indict Cohn but instead by
his efforts as Attorney General to rein in Hoover and bring down the organized
crime networks that had first blackmailed Hoover and later formed an “unsavory

128

alliance” with him. According to von Hoffman, regarding Hoover's strategy:

Hurting Kennedy demanded some ingenuity, for the target was clean on money, far cleaner on
sex than his brother, in short not an easy one to bring down. One approach might be to
embarrass him with his liberal constituency, to depict him as a ruthless Attorney General
indifferent to the Bill of Rights and individual liberty. To put the plan into effect, Roy was
needed as a membrane of protection for the Director; others were needed, including
Congressman Gallagher who was making a reputation for himself in the House as a civil
libertarian, a legislator committed to preventing the government from turning itself, by aid of

computers, lie detectors and advanced electronics, into a free-world version of Big Brother. 22

According to Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher, Cohn called him up and asked him if
he would meet with “a friend of ours” who wanted to talk “about some real
substantive abuses that are going on in the United States” that could form the
basis for a series of Congressional hearings. This “friend” was Sid Zagri, chief
lobbyist for the Teamsters Union. At the time that Robert Kennedy instructed his
Justice Department to target Cohn he had also had his sights set on the organized
crime-linked head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa, meaning that the
Teamsters had their own score to settle with the Attorney General.

The meeting with Zagri went forward. Zagri had brought with him a trove of
documents that were “aimed at Bobby Kennedy and the strike force concept, the
IRS, the uses that Kennedy was making of them,” according to Gallagher. Zagri
said that he wanted Gallagher to host hearings on the material. When Gallagher
asked how he had acquired these “dangerous” documents, Zagri said, “Don't
worry about it”2° In Gallaghers version of what happened, he gave a
noncommittal response to Zagri about the possibility of hearings. Zagri
responded, stating that he had been promised by Cohn that Gallagher would do
the hearings. The meeting went downhill from there and ended when Gallagher
angrily ejected Zagri from his office.

Cohn called Gallagher the next day, telling him, “You made a big mistake,’ to
which Gallagher responded that he had not wanted to commit because he was
unsure of the documents’ authenticity. Cohn then revealed that the documents
were authentic, as they had come from the FBI, adding, “They all come from Mr.
Hoover and Mr. Deke DeLoach [one of the two top assistants to the director]. Mr.
Hoover will consider it a very personal favor if you chair these hearings. He's sick

and tired of the bullshit of Bobby Kennedy”! Gallagher responded that he
wanted to stay out of the brewing battle between Kennedy and Hoover, stating, “I
don't agree with what Bobby’s doing; I think it’s terrible. I don’t agree with what
Hoover's doing; it’s even worse.” Cohn promised that if Gallagher did host the
hearings both Hoover and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa would shower him with
favors and aid his reelection efforts. Gallagher was still unwilling to step into the
ring. Cohn warned him, “You're going to be sorry.... I know how they [the FBI]
work.... If you’re not their friend, you're their enemy? 82

Cohn would repeated the same thing to Gallagher a second time. This next
occasion saw Gallagher receive a letter prepared for his signature that demanded
that the attorney general at the time, Nick Katzenbach, appear before a
Congressional committee with the authorizations for the (illegal) bugging of civil
rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Gallagher asked who had produced this letter
for him to sign, since he had never dictated it to anyone. His secretary responded
that it had been Roy Cohn. Cohn, when contacted by Gallagher, asserted that
Hoover had dictated the letter because “he’s sick and tired of Bobby Kennedy
proclaiming himself the great liberal when he himself signed the authorizations of
his bugging? 33 Gallagher declined to do the director’s bidding once more, to
which Cohn again replied, “You're going to be sorry.... I told you before, if you're
not their friend, you're their enemy. They’re gonna get you” 134

Hoover made good on his threat, and, in 1968, he leaked a story to LIFE
magazine that tied Gallagher to mobster Joe Zicarelli in the middle of Gallagher’s
reelection campaign. The story relied on transcripts of taped conversations
allegedly between Gallagher and Zicarelli, whose organized criminal activities and
role in arms smuggling was discussed in the previous chapter. The FBI later denied
the authenticity of these recordings, though some have posited that the tapes
might have been authentic, with the FBI only denying their validity to avoid
admitting they had illegally wiretapped Gallagher. Given that Gallagher had long
been friendly with Cohn, the Zicarelli tie is not outside the realm of possibility, as
Zicarelli was an alleged business associate of Lewis Rosenstiel, who was close to
Cohn as well as Hoover.

However, the story in LIFE is a bit odd for a few reasons. For instance, it failed
to establish any benefit to Gallagher from his alleged dealings with the Mafia. It
did claim that Gallagher had asked for the Mafia’s help in disposing of a dead body,
yet Gallagher was not accused of killing him, and the person appeared to have

died of natural causes as there were no indications of foul play. The article
provided no explanation as to why Gallagher would not have just called a doctor
or the police if the man had died of natural causes on his property. The article also
asserted that Gallagher’s criticisms of the FBI’s and the Justice Department's
wiretaps were mainly motivated by his purported “alliance” with these Mafia
figures. Considering that the FBI itself was later revealed to have been the source
of the accusations detailed in the LIFE article, as well as Hoover’s own conflicts of
interest relating to organized crime, the claims about Gallagher in this article are
best taken with a grain of salt.

After publication of the LIFE story, Gallagher claimed he was again threatened
by Hoover, with Roy Cohn again serving as the conduit. Gallagher was told that
he had to resign or an even more sensational story would be published, this one
involving a man allegedly dying in his bed after fornicating with his wife and with
Gallagher again asking for Mafia help in disposing of the body. Gallagher was told
by both Roy Cohn and a mutual friend of theirs, Neil Walsh, that Hoover was
going to have the story published in LIFE unless Gallagher resigned from
Congress in the next ten days. According to Cohn, Hoover wanted Gallagher out
of Congress because he was “too dangerous” for them, as he had not agreed to
Hoover's demands now on two occasions. Walsh summed up the situation by
telling Gallagher, “You're not their friend, so you're finished” B£ Needless to say,
Gallagher did not take kindly to the threats and delivered a speech on the House
floor, exposing Hoover's threats and claiming that the FBI had leaked false
information to LIFE in a plot against him. Gallagher won reelection despite the
FBI director’s efforts, but he was indicted in 1972 for perjury and tax evasion.82

Regarding Hoover's attempt to blackmail him, Gallagher later stated:

“The Faustian contracts that were daily made by important parts of the United States media on

these kinds of deals, without any recourse as to what the hell they were really building up, has

become part and parcel of why we don’t have a goddamn presidential candidate around

anymore.... You know it’s okay to talk about these things, but information is controlled and the

bastards [i. e., men like Hoover] have the information, and they use guys like Roy as the
»138

interlocutors? =>>

Von Hoffman notes that Gallagher’s statement here has “special meaning”
given Cohn’s subsequent role in similar political power plays, such as those that
doomed the vice presidential candidacies of Thomas Eagleton in 1972 and
Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.132 The weaponization of the media, however, was but

one of the methods employed by Cohn and allies such as Hoover in their
elaborate “favor bank” system.

COHN AND CORBALLY

Re Cohn served Hoover politically through various means, including by
cting as his intermediary in political battles and other power struggles. Cohn
and Hoover understood the power of blackmail quite intimately, with both
allegedly having been blackmailed themselves, leading to their roles in the Plaza
hotel “blue suite” parties. Not only is there evidence of Cohn and Hoover
participating in sexual-blackmail rackets alongside Lewis Rosenstiel and (in
Hoover’s case) Sherman Kaminsky, but there is also evidence of Cohn and
Hoover having ties to another sexual-blackmail scandal of the 1960s, one which
took place in the United Kingdom and is remembered today as “the Profumo
Affair.” The key link between Hoover, Cohn, and the Profumo Affair is a man
named Thomas Corbally, who used Cohn as a conduit to pass inside information
on the scandal to Hoover's FBI as it was unfolding.

Corbally came from a family of private investigators, and his family’s detective
agency had close ties to organized crime, particularly Meyer Lansky and his
immediate network. These ties were extensive enough that the Corbally family
used their detective agency to benefit organized crime interests, which included
spying on federal agents in the 1920s and 1930s. As a young man, Thomas
Corbally served in World War II in the OSS according to Anthony Summers and
Stephen Dorril, though this is disputed by others such as author Steven Snider,
who calls the claim a “Corbally embellishment’”“2 Corbally does appear to have
served in intelligence during the war but in military intelligence via the Army
Counterintelligence Corps. He subsequently served in the War Department
Detachment, a group whose name has been used interchangeably with the
Department of the Army Detachment. The latter was a name used as cover by the
CIA in Europe in the immediate post-war period ++

In the 1950s, Corbally became a jet-setting private detective who courted the
rich and famous, particularly in London and New York. During this period, he
met and befriend Roy Cohn, and the two remained close, with Cohn serving as
Corbally’s attorney over the years. In the 1960s, Corbally began living in London,
sharing an apartment with William Mellon Hitchcock of the wealthy Mellon

family, who was previously mentioned in Chapter 1. Mellon Hitchcock was the
former in-law of David Bruce, an OSS station chief and close ally of William
Casey. During the time Corbally and Mellon Hitchcock shared an apartment in
London, Bruce was US ambassador to the United Kingdom.

While living together, Mellon Hitchcock and Corbally developed a reputation

for throwing “wild parties” or “orgies” for the elite

At the same time, Corbally
was courting organized crime networks in the United Kingdom, becoming close
to Irish gangster Johnny Francis, who later facilitated the entry of Philadelphia
mob boss Angelo Bruno into various businesses in London. Those interests
included the Colony Sports Club, where Meyer Lansky associate and Washington,
DC-based mobster Joe Nesline held a significant stake.

Both Bruno and Francis worked closely with Ronnie and Reggie Kray, twin
brothers and nightclub owners who ran the London-based organized crime gang
known as “The Firm” for over a decade. As Stephen Snider and Douglas
Thompson have both noted, the Kray brothers “were known to have supplied ‘rent
boys’ [teenage boys] to Lord Boothby [Conservative MP and former Churchill
aide] during” the time they were associated with Johnny Francis.4“? Declassified
MIS documents reveal that British intelligence was aware of the Boothby-Kray
association that included “sex parties” and “rent boys” at the time these events
took place, with those documents also referring to both Boothby and Ronnie Kray
as “‘hunters’ of young men.”“#

Corbally was not only plugged into the more powerful crime networks in the
UK, but he was also a member of the Clermont Club, an elite group of gamblers in
1960s London. Many of Clermont’s members became extremely powerful during
the government of Margaret Thatcher. Several members also later developed close
ties to Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, and the global arms trade. The
Clermont Club was opened by John Aspinall in London’s Mayfair district in 1962.
Aspinall gave £3,000 to Corbally shortly after he opened the exclusive casino.
While he publicly claimed the payment was to settle an old gambling debt with
the detective, others associated with the club claimed it was meant as tribute to
the organized crime networks that, by that time, were deeply connected to
Corbally.

The Clermont Club, as noted in Adam Curtis’ documentary series The
Mayfair Set, acted as a catalyst for the formation of a power nexus around a series
of powerful businessmen and politicians who were incredibly influential during

Margaret Thatcher’s government during the 1980s.1# At the center of this nexus
were figures such as David Stirling, Sir James Goldsmith, and Roland Walter
Rowland. Goldsmith later employed Thomas Corbally directly. Lord Boothby was
also a member of the Clermont Club.

Stirling and Rowland, in particular, had significant ties to the global arms
trade as well as relationships with Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who
later became a client of Roy Cohn as well as Jeffrey Epstein around the same time,
as well as a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair. Both Stirling and Rowland also had
their own associations with the Iran-Contra operation. Roland Walter Rowland,
better known as “Tiny” Rowland, was also a very close associate of Robert
Maxwell, as was fellow Clermont Club member and corporate raider James
Goldsmith. Goldsmith not only had ties to Maxwell, but also to white collar
crime-linked figures including Charles Keating, Michael Milken, and, later, Jeffrey
Epstein. Both Keating and Milken were directly connected to the savings and loan
scandal of the 1980s that, according to Pete Brewton and others, was largely the
result of a collaboration between the CIA and organized crime. The Goldsmith-
Epstein connection is revisited in Chapter 11. Another figure at the Clermont
Club was Jack Dellal, whose family business later backed Christine Maxwell's
homeland-security-focused software venture, Chiliad (see Chapter 21).

In the context of Corbally and the Profumo affair, another very important
member of the Clermont Club was a man named Stephen Ward. Ward was an
osteopath, who became intimately acquainted with top figures in Britain's
aristocracy through W. Averell Harriman. Harriman was the former governor of
New York whose Wall Street firm, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., had been
financially entangled with assets of Nazi Germany well after World War II had
begun. Harriman’s bank employed George H.W. Bush's father Prescott Bush and
his maternal grandfather father George Herbert Walker. At the time he was
promoting Ward, Harriman was an “Ambassador at Large” of the Kennedy State
Department.”

Wards friends among the British elite included the Churchills and
photographer of the royal family Sterling Henry Nahum.+ Nahum was
particularly close to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle and mentor to
Prince Charles.+48 Nahum, Ward, and Lord Mountbatten were attendees of the so-
called Thursday Club, which Nahum is said to have founded. Other attendees at

the Thursday get-togethers included Prince Philip and the Kray twins. Many of

the attendees of the Thursday Club dinners were involved in sex parties, such as
those hosted by Corbally and Mellon Hitchcock. Nahum was also a regular host
of such parties at his apartment in Piccadilly, some of which featured “girls dressed
only in Masonic aprons” +? Ward regularly attended Nahum’s sexually explicit get-
togethers as well as analogous events hosted by elite members of British society.

Ward's “talents” were quickly recognized by British intelligence outfit MI6,
which had a “reputation for targeting visiting dignitaries in the UK with sexual
blackmail operations and recognized Ward's potential in this regard,” according to
Steven Snider.*4 Ward was first approached by MI6 agent Harold Tracey in 1952
and Tracey cultivated him for years with the help of a close confidant of Ward's,
Warwick Charlton. Tracey regularly passed MI6-derived money to Ward via
Charlton, but MI6 has since claimed that they never made “operational use” of
Ward, despite their known interest and funding +?

During the early 1960s, when Corbally and the Clermont Club were
becoming established in London, a British politician named John Profumo, who
was then serving as the UK’s Secretary of State for War, met Christine Keeler.
Keeler was a nineteen-year-old model who lived with Stephen Ward, and she
began having an affair with Profumo shortly after they met. Keeler was
simultaneously having an affair with Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet military attaché and
GRU agent in London. Ward allowed Keeler and Ivanov to use his apartment over
the course of their affair, and Ivanov had his own ties to Ward, having sought to
use Ward as a back channel between the Soviet Union and the UK during the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. MIS began to have concerns that Ivanov was
“working” Ward, and Keeler later asserted that Ward was a British and Soviet
double agent. Incidentally, Ward was also close to the Astor family and rented a
cottage from them. The Astor family’s estate at Cliveden was the site of Profumo
and Keeler’s first meeting, which led to their subsequent affair.

The scandal began only after Keeler, for reasons that are still unclear, told
Labour MP John Lewis that she was having affairs with both Ivanov and Profumo.
Lewis subsequently informed Profumo’s political enemy, Labour MP George
Wigg. Wigg, like Ward, was an asset of British intelligence at the time. Between
her testimony to Lewis and via him to Wigg, Keeler also told her story to the
British press, causing a scandal to erupt around Profumo and leading not only to
his resignation but to the breakdown of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative
government. As an aside, Macmillan’s wife was allegedly in a long-term adulterous

relationship with the aforementioned Lord Boothby, who was a member of the
Clermont Club along with Stephen Ward and tied to the same organized-crime
networks as Corbally.

According to Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy in An Affair of State, as
cited by Steven Snider, it was David Bruce — William Mellon Hitchcock's former
in-law and former OSS station chief - who involved Corbally directly in the
Profumo affair. According to the authors, Bruce was asked by Macmillan to
uncover the truth surrounding Profumo’ relationship with Keeler, and Bruce
turned to Corbally for information due to Corbally’s relationship with Ward, his
profession as a private detective, and his close friendship with Mellon Hitchcock.
Snider also notes a different account of these events is offered by Anthony
Summers and Stephen Dorril in their book The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward.
Summers and Dorril assert that it was Ward himself who “dropped in” on Corbally
and Mellon Hitchcock, where he confessed everything to them and begged them
for help in preventing Keeler’s story from going to press.*>*

Whatever the details, Ward, Corbally, and Mellon Hitchcock ultimately met
with David Bruce’s assistant Alfred Wells, and Ward told Wells how the incidents
at the heart of the Profumo affair had transpired. At least a month prior to that
meeting and apparently before Keeler had revealed the affair to John Lewis, both
Corbally and Mellon Hitchcock had known about Profumo and Keeler via Ward.
Bruce's role in these meetings with Wells seems odd, as he sat on this inside
information about the affair despite its security implications for the US State
Department and the Anglo-American establishment.

Hoover's FBI got the inside scoop from Corbally and began investigating
other women of interest in Stephen Ward's circle while the Profumo affair was just
beginning. Corbally kept the FBI informed of developments in the scandal
through Roy Cohn, Corbally’s longtime friend and attorney. In the public release
of the FBI case files on the affair, nicknamed the “Bowtie dossier,” the information
that Cohn gave to the FBI is entirely censored, as is a seventeen-page interview the
FBI had with Corbally.4°> One of the reasons for these extensive redactions likely
owes to the ties between the other women associated with Stephen Ward and
efforts to sexually blackmail John F. Kennedy. Peter Dale Scott discusses this
subject in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, drawing partially on the work of
Anthony Summers in Official and Confidential:

[Meyer] Lansky had by the 1930s acquired compromising evidence of Hoover's homosexual
activities. In the 1950s, Meyer Lansky, and other mob figures such as Sam Giancana, supplied
women to John F. Kennedy, some of whom were logged into Hoover’s growing files of dirt on
the young senator. In the 1960s this deep political equilibrium was threatened by Robert
Kennedy’s war on organized crime, which alienated Hoover. Feeling increasingly threatened,
especially after the Kennedys began to collect their own files on Hoover, both Hoover and the
mob began to escalate their collection of Kennedy sexual dirt. At first Hoover gained White
House influence by protecting the Kennedys against mob blackmail, but in 1963 Hoover,
desperate, began to leak some of his own dirt on Kennedy to the public.

Hoover’s sexual dirt on the Kennedys began to surface in late June 1963, after the
President’s “peace speech” at American University with its appeal, “Let us reexamine our
attitude toward the Cold War.” On June 20, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an
agreement establishing a “hot line” between the Kremlin and the White House.

A week later, there was a flurry of veiled hints linking the President to the Profumo story,
such as the Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column for June 29: “Britishers who read American
criticisms of Profumo throw back the question “What high American official was involved with
Marilyn Monroe?”

On the same day, in a front-page story, the Hearst paper in New York, the Journal-American,
linked the Christine Keeler-Stephen Ward sex ring itself to a” ‘high U.S. aide,” one of the biggest
names in American politics. Back in 1960, after his election but before his inauguration, the
President had slept with two members of the ring, including Mariella Novotny (a former

stripper in London’s Club Pigalle) 456

Mariella Novotny, born Stella Marie Capes, met Stephen Ward through her
job as a stripper at the Mayfair nightclub The Black Sheep. The owner of that club,
Horace Dibben, was a close friend of Ward’s who also had an interest in sex
parties. Dibben’s sex parties were alleged to have a notably occult element, with
allegations of “black magic and men in masks” as well as “ritual sadomasochism”
based around a master/slave dynamic. Novotny was directly involved in Dibben’s
occult-themed sex parties, which reportedly attracted prominent individuals in
Harold Macmillan’s government as VIP guests as well as Stephen Ward.*°2

Novotny was subsequently whisked away from London to New York, where
she began working as an upscale prostitute, servicing a lengthy list of powerful
men out of four different apartments just months after she arrived. She had been
brought to New York through her affair with Harry Alan Towers, a British
television producer, and both were charged with operating a sexual-blackmail ring
in New York that specifically targeted UN diplomats and other men of influence.
John F. Kennedy was also reportedly one of her “clients.”

Before she fled the US in 1961, Novotny left her address book, replete with
the names and contact information of America’s rich and powerful, with the FBI.
For “mysterious reasons,’ the FBI dropped its case against Novotny and Towers

and chose to destroy Novotny’s address book as well as their files on both
Novotny and Towers.+°8

The other woman linked to both Stephen Ward and efforts to sexually
blackmail John F. Kennedy was Suzy Chang, a former nurse turned model who
moved to London at nineteen. How Chang met Ward is still unknown, though
Chang later described Ward as “a good, good, good friend” whom she had met
sometime in the early 1950s.4°2 Chang was associated with Ward’s close friend
and Thursday Club founder Sterling Henry Nahum and lived at the Nell Gywne
House in London, where another woman working with Ward also lived. William
Mellon Hitchcock, Corbally’s London roommate, later referred to Chang as “one
of Stephen’s girls,” and Chang later confirmed that she knew Corbally as well 1°

Novotny is the source of the claim that Chang had sex with John F. Kennedy,
which is possible given that Chang was in the US in both 1960 and 1961. Chang
acknowledged knowing Kennedy but denied having sex with him. According to
Snider, she reportedly denied the affair with “less vigor” as time went by,
however1®! Another noteworthy event that, according to Snider, was more
indicative of “shadowy purposes” was Chang’s mother hiring the law firm of
former OSS chief William Donovan to secure Suzy Chang a visa to the US in
1962.162 The year 1962 was a critical year for John Kennedy, and it also happened
to be the year that the Profumo affair first surfaced.

The first stories on the Profumo affair emerged in the midst of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, which may explain why Keeler decided to go public with her story
and create a scandal around her lover, costing him his career and setting in motion
the destruction of the entire Macmillan government. As previously mentioned,
Ivanov had attempted to use Ward as a back channel during the crisis. Not only
that, but Ivanov and Ward were also working with Permanent Undersecretary of
the British Foreign Office, Harold Caccia, to arrange a summit conference in
England to resolve the crisis. The precise timing of the Profumo affair ensured that
Ivanov would be rapidly recalled to Moscow, thus scuttling plans for the summit.

In addition, as Peter Dale Scott points out, the reports attempting to link
President Kennedy to the Profumo affair only emerged after Kennedy’s June 1963
“peace speech.” That speech deeply unsettled the anti-Communist network that
included Hoover, Cohn, and others, and stories attempting to tie Kennedy to
Profumo’s scandal were published by the Hearst Journal-American. The paper’s
editor, Guy Richards, was very much involved in this anti-Communist network

and had “excellent intelligence contacts,’ according to Peter Dale Scott, citing
Anthony Summers.® Summers also noted that the story was published shortly
after Richards brought an anti-Communist friend of Keeler’s, Michael Eddowes,
to the United States.

In addition, Roy Cohn was a longtime close personal friend of Richard Berlin,
the top manager of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate, which owned the Journal-
American+% Cohn was notorious for placing stories in Hearst newspapers, as well
as publications controlled by his other close friends, such as Si Newhouse, for the
benefit of his clients and his network.

The Profumo affair was probably Corbally’s most notable tie to a sex-
blackmail ring, but it was hardly his only such connection. Years later, Corbally
was deeply connected to the so-called Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss, as well as
a VIP S & M scene in the Hamptons. Corbally claimed, in the case of the latter, to
have started that ring, which he said he had “imported” from the UK.1°° He was
also said to possess numerous “pictures of various individuals engaged in some
rather strange sexual practices that were staples of these parties”16 Another
important association of Corbally’s, though not tied necessarily to sexual
blackmail, was his connection to Jules Kroll of Kroll and Associates, with many
early Kroll employees crediting Corbally for the firm's initial success. Kroll and
Associates, long known as the “CIA of Wall Street” and believed by French
intelligence to have been an actual front for the CIA, makes a few, yet critically
important appearances in the last days of Robert Maxwell and other events related
to Maxwell’s posthumous legacy in the US, which are discussed in more detail in
Chapter 15.

THE UNITED DYE WEB

Ant interesting figure in Corbally’s close orbit worth exploring is his
entor, John G. “Steve” Broady. Broady was a private investigator who had
more than a few run-ins with the law, including for his role in the wiretapping of
then mayor of New York William O’Dwyer on behalf of Broady’s longtime
employer Clendenin Ryan.+67 Ryan was not only Broady’s principal sponsor, but
also the main financial backer of the International Services of Information
Foundation, a private intelligence outfit that had been formed by Ulius Amoss, a

veteran of the OSS. Amoss was known, after his service in the OSS, for investing

in companies embedded in the country’s growing military-industrial complex,
some of which were alleged to be CIA fronts for money laundering.“®° Another
prominent figure linked to the foundation was Charles Willoughby, Douglas
MacArthur's former intelligence chief, who was a trustee.

Clendenin Ryan's son, Clendenin Ryan Jr., was close to a man named Douglas
Caddy, who led an anti-Communist group called Young Americans for Freedom
(YAF). Clendenin Ryan Jr. and Caddy were roommates at Georgetown University,
and the former was “tangentially involved in founding YAF.”4® Another key
member of YAF was former CIA officer, National Review founder, and close friend
of Roy Cohn, William F. Buckley. Caddy’s ties to the George Town Club,
“established in 1966 for the purpose of bringing together leaders who had an
impact on the United States, and the world,’ via another of his college roommates,
Tongsun Park, and the sex blackmail rings that surrounded both that club and the
Watergate scandal are discussed in the next chapter?”

Another associate of Broady’s was Peter Crosby, whose brother — James
Crosby — was the chairman of Resorts International (formerly Mary Carter Paint)
in the Bahamas. Top investors in Resorts International included the Moody family
company American National Insurance Company (ANICO) and Delafield &
Delafield. ANICO and the Moody family, specifically Roy Cohn’s close friend
Shearn Moody Jr., are mentioned in future chapters. Delafield & Delafield is worth
noting as it was William Mellon Hitchock’s employer. +

Peter Crosby was a stock manipulator and associate of organized crime figures
who made an appearance in the financial webs surrounding the United Dye stock
swindle, the aftermath of which resulted in the indictment of Roy Cohn in the
early 1960s. During their “adventures” together in the 1970s, Crosby and Broady
were arrested in 1973, though only Crosby went to prison. According to the late
journalist Gary Webb, Broady evaded conviction because of his past work for the
CIA, an association Broady denied but that was attested to by Crosby associates.
Webb, citing reports in the Kentucky Post, also noted that the papers confiscated
from Crosby and Broady at the time of their arrest showed that the two men dealt
“with many of the same men believed by investigators to be part of a nationwide
network of confidence men and organized crime figures.” Crosby certainly
seems to have been part of such a network.

Before his 1973 arrest, for example, he was involved in shady financial
dealings with William McCarthy, brother of Texas oil tycoon Glenn McCarthy.

Those dealings centered around American Montana Oil & Gas, a dummy
corporation through which McCarthy aimed to seize properties then controlled
by Ajax Oil Company. Other companies were involved in McCarthy’s Ajax
takeover plan, including Sundown Oil Company, which counted Paul Roland
Jones as a director. Jones was a known figure in Chicago's organized crime scene
who had relocated to Texas in 1947 and was implicated in narcotics trafficking +4
He also, incidentally, had connections to Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein), the
gangster who is now best known for killing Lee Harvey Oswald after the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ruby also had connections to the Moody family
of ANICO. Crosby and McCarthy entered into an arrangement with Satiris
“Sonny” Fassoulis as part of this elaborate scheme. Fassoulis also had a business
relationship with a man named Alexander Guterma and the Bon Ami company,
which played a critical role in the United Dye swindle.

Guterma was a Russian national who came to the United States in the 1950s,
arriving first in California before relocating to Florida. There he launched
Shawano Corporation and began acquiring other companies by trading Shawano
stock. He soon made his way to Las Vegas, where “he found the Vegas mob at the
Desert Inn eager to unload the hotelt Guterma “then traded Shawano stock for
the little Isle d’Capri Hotel, Bay Harbor Islands, forming the nucleus of United
Hotels Inc., which was to dump the Desert Inn on the public if need be. The
Desert Inn was very much a focus of Cohn’s trial related to United Dye. As
previously mentioned, the Desert Inn’s manager, Allard Roen, was also in the
employ of mobster Moe Dalitz and was a key figure in the United Dye trial. So was
Sam Garfield — a lifelong friend of Dalitz.

The government asserted in its case against Cohn that Eli Boyer, the
accountant who helped Cohn take control of Lionel Corporation, had been used
by Cohn to pipeline threats to Roen to keep him from giving truthful testimony to
the grand jury investigating United Dye. Boyer confirmed this in his testimony. In
addition, Boyer, Roen, Garfield, Dalitz, and Cohn had all been the original
investors together in a venture called Sunrise hospital.7° In June 1955, Guterma
and Sam Garfield as well as Irving Pasternak teamed up to acquire the Franklin
County Coal Corporation. That same month, Guterma became an associate of
Virgil Dardi, who was then a director at United Dye and subsequently arranged to
sell Guterma a large bloc of shares in the company. Guterma then distributed that
stock between himself, Garfield, Pasternak, and others. By that September,

Guterma had become chairman of the United Dye board, with Dardi serving as its
president.

The following year, Guterma took control of a manufacturing company called
F. L. Jacobs. The intention of Guterma and his associates was to “loot and divert
for their own purposes the assets of F. L. Jacobs and to use its credit as collateral
for loans, the proceeds of which were diverted to Gutermas own use and
benefit”! Soon after, Dardi informed Guterma that the Bon Ami company had
63,000 shares for sale; they then arranged for the purchase of those shares by
United Dye via a loan from F. L. Jacobs. Guterma later testified that they had taken
control of Bon Ami to “enable Garfield and Pasternak to satisfy the $519,000
obligation owed by them to United Dye.” To support Guterma’s testimony in the
United Dye case, the government “introduced evidence of various ‘loan’
transactions involving Garfield and Pasternak and, as directors of Bon Ami,
Guterma and Dardi,” many of which involved United Dye.

When the decision was made to use the United Dye grand jury to “get Cohn,”
Garfield and Pasternak evaded being sentenced in exchange for their testimony
against Cohn and other accomplices. As previously mentioned, their deals to
obtain immunity, which were not publicly acknowledged, helped convince a jury
to acquit Cohn during the retrial (i. e., the second trial that followed the initial
mistrial) of the United Dye case. Guterma had already been found guilty and was
serving a four-year prison sentence for having looted millions from F. L. Jacobs
when Cohn’s case went to trial. He was sentenced in 1961.

Before Guterma was caught and the United Dye swindle unraveled, Guterma
and Dardi used Bon Ami company to establish ties with some interesting figures
as they obtained a controlling stake in the company. In 1957, Guterma and Dardi
entered into negotiations with an entertainment executive named Matthew Fox in
which they sought to purchase $5 million worth of spot time for TV commercials
for Bon Ami.422 Bon Ami loaned Fox $115,000, and Fox arranged for Guild Films
to supply Bon Ami spot time if Fox defaulted on the loan, which he did.

Fox was much more than a television/movie executive, however, as he had led
a CIA front in Indonesia, the American-Indonesian Corporation, until the early
1950s.+%4 In that capacity, Fox had controlled extensive rights to develop
Indonesias natural resources and also controlled all Indonesian government

buying and selling in the United States.+8 He was also involved in covertly

supporting the CIA-backed prime minister of the country, Mohammed Hatta, at
the behest of agency intermediaries.+83

That same year, 1957, Guterma entered into negotiations with Sonny
Fassoulis, leading to Fassoulis’ acquisition of over 100,000 shares of Bon Ami
stock. At the time, 25,000 of these shares were owned by another Guterma-
controlled company, the Chatham Corporation. Fassoulis did not have the money
for the purchase, however, and sold film rights held by a company he controlled,
Icthyan Associates, to Bon Ami to cover the cost. The so-called Icthyan package
was intended to “enable Bon Ami to obtain television spot time by transferring the
‘Icthyan Package’ to Guild Films as credit against the purchase price of a large
quantity of television spot time” +84

Well before Fassoulis and Fox entered the scene as it related to Bon Ami, they
appeared to have already been involved in a shadowy financial network that
involved Virgil Dardi. In 1953, Fox was the chairman of a company called Pola-
Lite, and Fassoulis was its president. Pola-Lite was actually the subsidiary for an
intelligence-linked company named Commerce International Corporation that
Fassoulis ran.48* Around the same time, in 1954, it was reported that Matthew Fox
was president of C & C Television corporation, a subsidiary of C & C Super
Corporation, where Virgil Dardi served as a director. This connects Fassoulis, Fox,
and Dardi together years before Guterma and Dardi became involved in the
events surrounding the United Dye situation.

Around the same time the United Dye scandal erupted, in the early 1960s, an
investigation was launched into the David, Josephine and Winfield Baird
Foundation and the Lansing Foundation, both of which were controlled by New
York businessman David Baird. The Baird Foundation was listed as owning 24.5
percent of the C & C Television Corporation that Matthew Fox ran, and the
foundation also owned significant rights to several other C & C subsidiaries. The
Baird Foundation’s clients included several organized crime associates, such as
Lansky front man Louis Chesler; real estate magnate William Zeckendorf; and
Lawrence Wien, another real estate magnate who was a partner in the Dalitz-
linked Desert Inn that was tied to the United Dye case. As mentioned in Chapter
1, Wien had bought the Empire State Building from “Supermob” figure Henry
Crown.

Other clients of the Baird Foundation included Allen & Co., which later
became closely involved with Les Wexner’s “mentor” Max Fisher, as well as the

director of Maurice L. Rothschild, Nathan Cummings. Cummings was a director
of Bon Ami company and was personally involved in selling the controlling stake
of that company to United Dye when it was controlled by Guterma and Dardi.+86
Cummings subsequently departed Bon Ami, which opened spots for Guterma
and Dardi on its board.

As for David Baird himself, he and Charles Allen of Allen & Co. were known
to have dealings with Guterma, even after the Las Vegas mob, specifically the
Desert Inn crowd tied to Moe Dalitz, “had exhausted its use” of Guterma in the
aftermath of United Dye’s unraveling +®2 In addition, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield,
attorney for Permindex and whose law firm was deeply enmeshed with the
Bronfman family, wrote to Carlo d’Amelio of Permindex’s Italian subsidiary in
1961, describing the interest that Permindex had cultivated among American
businessmen, specifically David Baird, in their affairs and projects.1°8

Another interesting thread concerning David Baird is related to his client and
the de facto banker for the Baird Foundation, Serge Semenenko. Semenenko was
the vice president of First National Bank of Boston, whose executives were close
to the CIA. The Baird Foundation itself was later revealed to be an asset of the
CIAs International Organizations Division and, between 1961 and 1964, received
$456,800 of agency funds in “pass throughs” that were piped into CIA programs
in the Middle East and Africa.1®?

In addition to the direct CIA connection, there is also some level of
connection between Baird and Meshulam Riklis. As mentioned in Chapter 2,
Riklis took over not only Lewis Rosenstiel’s business empire but purchased his
blackmail-ready townhouse at around the same time.

Jonathan Marshall, in his article “Wall Street, the Supermob and the CIA,”
notes:

Not long after Semenenko left First National, at the height of the 1960s merger mania, he began
wheeling and dealing with Baird over the fate of Stanley Warner Corp., a leading theater owner
that Baird had advised on financial matters since 1956. The first public hint of their dealings
came in November 1967, when New York City newspapers touted Baird’s philanthropy by
reporting that he was chairing the annual Celebrity Ball of the Variety Club of New York in
honor of Democratic Rep. Emmanuel Celler. Vice chairmen for the ball were Semenenko,
Stanley Warner Corp. Chairman S. H. Fabian, and Meshulam Riklis, the young, Odessa-born
chairman of Glen Alden Corp., a fast-growing conglomerate that was angling to acquire Stanley

Warner”222

Marshall goes onto reveal that Celler, once the chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee, was a “notable friend” of Lewis Rosenstiel. He also notes
that David Baird received a $3 million finder’s fee for his role in arranging sale of
Stanley Warner stock to Riklis’ Glen Alden Corporation. Shortly thereafter, Rikdis,
via Glen Alden, took control of Rosenstiel’s Schenley Industries. Incidentally,
another Baird associate, Charles Allen of Allen and Co., had previously considered
acquiring Schenley before Riklis succeeded in doing so.

Ultimately, this series of serpentine financial connections reveals a dense web
linking several organized crime figures, their intermediaries, organized crime-
linked businessmen, and intelligence agencies. Some key figures in this network,
as mentioned in this and previous chapters, engaged in various forms of blackmail
and power plays to ensure the continued growth of both their legal and illegal
financial interests. As we shall see, this incestuous web of crime, intrigue, and
covert action that was tightly interwoven throughout major events of the 1960s
would continue its expansion, largely unimpeded and employing many of the
same tactics, throughout the decades that followed.

Endnotes

U A WU N>

14
15

17
18

20

Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 414.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 465.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 49.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 49.

“Albert Cohn Dies; A Former Justice,’ New York Times, January 9, 1959,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1959/01/09/89104614.html?
pageNumber=27,

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 50.

Where's My Roy Cohn?, 2019, [DVD] Directed by M. Tyrnauer, Sony Pictures.

“Albert Cohn Marries; First Assistant District Attorney Weds Miss Dorothy Marcus,’ New York
Times, January 12, 1924, https://www.nytimes.com/1924/01/12/archives/albert-cohn-
marries-first-assistant-district-attorney-weds-miss.html?searchResultPosition=11

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 414.

Robert Shogan, No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: ADemagogue Falls and
Television Takes Charge of American Politics (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 139.

Kenneth T. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd edition (New Haven : New York:
Yale University Press ; New-York Historical Society), 2010, p. 1015.

Christopher M. Elias, Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of
Insinuation (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2021), 120.

Michael Whitney Straight, Trial by Television and Other Encounters, 1st ed. (New York: Devon
Press, 1979), 180; “Justice Albert Cohn Takes Office,’ New York Times, April 3, 1929,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1929/04/03/95902552.html?
pageNumber=37.

“Justice Albert Cohn Promoted,’ New York Times, April 28, 1937, p.17.

Nicholas Pileggi, “The Mob and the Machine,’ New York Magazine, May 5, 1986.
https://nymag.com/news/features/crime/46610/.

David Samuels, “The Mayor and the Mob,’ Smithsonian, October 2019,

180973078/.

Pileggi, “The Mob and the Machine”

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its
Hold on America, 1947-2000, 1st ed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), chap. 1,
https://archive.org/details/moneypowermakingOOdent.

James Cockayne, “How the Mafia Almost Fixed the 1932 Democratic National Convention,’
The New Republic, July 25, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/135466/mafia-almost-
fixed-1932-democratic-national-convention; Martin A Gosch and Richard Hammer, The Last
Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (Enigma Books, 2013), 163.
Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (New York:
Paddington Press : distributed Grosset & Dunlap, 1979), 173; Gosch and Hammer, Last
Testament of Lucky Luciano, 163-64.

21

22
23

24
25
26

27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37

38

39

40

41
42

43

44

Jay Maeder, “Inside Mayor Jimmy (Beau James) Walker's Mighty Downfall,” New York Daily

walker-mighty-downfall-article- 1.792838.
Gosch and Hammer, Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, 105.

“Ed Flynn, the Bronx Boss at FDR's Side,’ Irish Echo Newspaper, March 14, 2012,
https://www.irishecho.com/2012/3/ed-flynn-the-bronx-boss-at-fdrs-side.

Shogan, No Sense of Decency, 122.

Denton and Morris, Money and Power, chap.1.

Bernard Ryan, Jr., “Murder, Inc. Trials: 1941,” https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/law-
magazines/murder-inc-trials-1941,

Samuels, “Mayor and Mob.’

Samuels, “Mayor and Mob.’

Samuels, “Mayor and Mob.’

Samuels, “Mayor and Mob.’

Samuels, “Mayor and Mob.’

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 83.

“High-Titled Bank Can Hold Its Name,’ New York Times, June 24, 1913.

“High-Titled Bank Can Hold Its Name?’

“High-Titled Bank Can Hold Its Name?’

“High-Titled Bank Can Hold Its Name?’

Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Syracuse
University Press, 1999), 11.

“Joseph S. Marcus, Banker, Dies at 65,’ New York Times, July 4, 1927.
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1927/07/04/120423238.html?
pageNumber=15.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, 2005,
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/Iweb/eresources/archives/rbml/NYSCrimeCommission/.
“Paul E. Lockwood, Dewey Aide, Dead,’ New York Times, September 2, 1973,
governors-secretary-was-on.html; Joan Cook, “James M. Crosby, 58, Founder of Hotel and
Casino Concern,’ New York Times, April 12, 1986,

and-casino-concern.html; Donald Janson, “Resorts Head Tells of Dropping Partner,’ New York
Times, January 17, 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/17/archives/resorts-head-tells-
of-dropping-partner.html.

Denton and Morris, Money and Power, chap.1.
“Kefauver to Hear Top Officials Here,” New York Times, January 24, 1951,

and-mayoralty-rivals.html.

“Albert Cohn Dies,’ New York Times, January 9, 1951,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1959/01/09/89104614.html?
pageNumber=27,.

“Joseph S. Marcus, Banker, Dies at 65,’ New York Times, July 4, 1927,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1927/07/04/120423238.html?

45

46

47

48

49

50

51
52
53

54

55

56

57

58

pageNumber=15.

“B.K Marcus Dies; Led Bank of US,” New York Times, July 18, 1954,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/07/18/83342783.html?
pageNumber=57.

“$300,000,000 Merger of Banks Approved,’ New York Times, May 10, 1929,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1929/05/10/95947545.html?
pageNumber=45.

Michael A. Whitehouse, “Paul Warburg's Crusade to Establish a Central Bank in the United
States,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, May 1, 1989,
https://www.minneapolisfed.org:443/article/1989/paul-warburgs-crusade-to-establish-a-
central-bank-in-the-united-states; Roger Lowenstein, “The Jewish Story Behind the U.S.
Federal Reserve Bank,’ The Forward, November 29, 2015.
https://forward.com/culture/325447/the-man-behind-the-fed/.

“B.K Marcus Dies; Led Bank of US,” New York Times, July 18, 1954,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/07/18/83342783.html?
pageNumber=57.

“President of Bank Reviews Its Growth,’ New York Times, February 2, 1930,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1930/02/02/96018687.html?
pageNumber=43.

“$1,000,000,000 Union of Banks Completed,’ New York Times, November 25, 1930,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1930/11/25/102190782.html?
pageNumber=9.

“§1,000,000,000 Union of Banks Completed.”

“§1,000,000,000 Union of Banks Completed.”

John Olszowka et al., America in the Thirties: America in the Twentieth Century (NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2014), 30.

“Bank Heads Face Contempt Action,” New York Times, February 25, 1931,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/02/25/100992834.html?
pageNumber=4; “Juggling of Loans by Bank Is Shown,’ New York Times, January 24, 1934,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1934/01/24/95029871.html?
pageNumber=11.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 47; Christopher, Gray, “Streetscapes: The Bank of the United
States in the Bronx,” New York Times, August 18, 1991,
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/18/realestate/streetscapes-bank-united-states-bronx-
first-domino-depression.html.

“Marcus Is Arrested as He Defies Steuer,” New York Times, February 21, 1931,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/02/21/98323627.html?
pageNumber=1; “$50,000,000 Suit Is Filed Against Bank US Officers,” New York Times,
February 12, 1931,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/02/12/102214836.html?
pageNumber=1.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 45; Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression:
Uncertain Promise (NY, Syracuse University Press, 1999), 14,

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 45.

59

65

66

67

68
69

70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79

80
81
82

83

“Justice Cohn Is Honored Here,” New York Times, June 7, 1930,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1930/06/07/96146710.html?
pageNumber=9,

Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 11.

Elias, Gossip Men, 109.

“Marcus and Singer Must Serve Terms,’ New York Times, March 15, 1933,
https://www.nytimes.com/1933/03/15/archives/marcus-and-singer-must-serve-terms-
appeals-court-upholds-their.html.

Elias, Gossip Men, 109.
David L. Marcus, “5 Things You May Not Know About My Vile, Malicious Cousin Roy Cohn,’

know/.
David B. Green, “1965: Pioneer of Electric Model Trains Dies,’ Haaretz, September 8, 2013,

trains-pioneer-dies/0000017f-f8cc-ddde-abff-fceda8150000.
“Joshua Lionel Cowen,” Jewish Virtual Library, n.d.

“J.L. Cowen Settles Bank of U.S. Suit,’ New York Times, February 27, 1934,
https://www.nytimes.com/1934/02/27/archives/jl-cowen-settles-bank-of-us-suit-former-
director-eliminated-from.html.

"J.L. Cowen Settles.”

“Fred W. Piderit, Bank Aide, 79, Dies,’ New York Times, June 20, 1961,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1961/06/20/97674643.html?
pageNumber=33.

“Joshua Lionel Cowen.”

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 273.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 300.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 52.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 51.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 54.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 68.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 70.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 69.

Tate Delloye, “The Godfather of Tabloid: How childhood friend of Roy Cohn and son of an
influential political fixer with ties to Mussolini left the CIA to start the National Enquirer with
a loan from mob boss Frank Costello,’ Mail Online, November 20, 2019,

Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”

Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”

Tate Delloye, “Roy Cohn: New Documentary Explores the Man Who Made Donald Trump,’
Mail Online, March 14, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6809557/Roy-Cohn-

Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”

84
85
86
87

88
89
90

91
92

93
94
95

96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106

107
108
109
110
111

112
113
114

Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”
Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”
Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 82.

“Miss Renee Schine Becomes a Bride,’ New York Times, December 29, 1950,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/12/29/82089074.html.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 169.
Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 168-70

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret
Government, First Harper Perennial edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2016), 176.
Delloye, “Godfather of Tabloid.”

“Catholic Anti-Communism,’ Crisis Magazine, March 1, 1996,
http://www.crisismagazine.com/1996/catholic-anti-communism-2.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 280.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 280-81.

Rod Dreher, “Cardinal Mary,’ The American Conservative, February 9, 2019.

frederic-martel/.

Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 188.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 188.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 188.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 189.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 189.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 189.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 186.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 187.
Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 188.
Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, 192.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 249; Joan Cook, “David W. Peck, 87, Former Justice And Court
Reformer in New York,’ New York Times, August 24, 1990,

court-reformer-in-new-york.html.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 250.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 259.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 259-60.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 272, 300.

Keith Wheeler and William Lambert, “Roy Cohn: Is He a Liar under Oath?, LIFE, October 4,
1963, p. 25, 100; Homer Bigart, “Witness Says Cohn Told Him ‘It’s No Crime Not to
Remember,” New York Times, April 4, 1964,
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/04/archives/witness-says-cohn-told-him-its-no-crime-
not-to-remember.html.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 260.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 261.

Wheeler and Lambert, “Cohn: Is He A Liar?,” 100.

115 Foster Hailey, “Cohn Scheduled for Trial Today,’ New York Times, March 23, 1964,
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/23/archives/cohn-scheduled-for-trial-today-he-is-

116 Ken Auletta, “Don’t Mess With Roy Cohn, The Man Who Made Donald Trump,’ Esquire,

cohn/.

117 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 282.

118 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 282-83.

119 Auletta, “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn,’; Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 295-96.

120 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 296-97.

121 Auletta, “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn.’

122 Auletta, “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn.’

123 Securities & Exchange Commission v. Fifth Ave. Coach Lines, Inc., 289 F. Supp. 3 (S.D.N.Y. 1968),
Justia Law, July 26, 1968, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
courts/FSupp/289/3/1419260/.

124 Securities & Exchange Commission v. Fifth Ave. Coach Lines.

125 Securities & Exchange Commission v. Fifth Ave. Coach Lines.

126 Willy Van Damme, “Mossad-A safe pass in Belgium,’ Willy Van Damme’s Weblog, February

belgi/.

127 Auletta, “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn.’

128 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 284.

129 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 284.

130 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 284-85.

131 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 285-86.

132 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 287.

133 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 331.

134 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 332.

135 Russell Sackett, Sandy Smith, and William Lambert, “The Congressman and the Hoodlum,’
LIFE, August 9, 1968, 20-26.

136 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 333-37.

137 Sam Roberts, “Cornelius E. Gallagher, 7-Term New Jersey Congressman, Dies at 97,” New York
Times, October 22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/obituaries/cornelius-
gallagher-dead.html.

138 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 341.

139 Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 341; Elizabeth Mehren, “A Thirst for Power : Life and Times of Roy
Cohn, the Flamboyant Lawyer Who Put Stamp on U.S. History,’ Los Angeles Times, March 18,
1988, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-18-vw-1638-story.html.

140 Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, Honeytrap - The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward: Sex,
Scandal and Deadly Secrets in the Profumo Affair (London: Headline, 2013), 249; S. William
Snider, A Special Relationship: Trump, Epstein, And the Secret History of the Anglo-American
Establishment, (Independently published, 2020), 332,
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/BO8PX93Z1H/.

141

142
143

144

145

146

147
148
149

150
151
152
153
154
155
156

157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164

165
166
167

“Klaus Barbie and the United States Government,’ US Department of Justice, August 1983,
56, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-hrsp/legacy/2011/02/04/08-02-
83barbie-rpt.pdf.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 347.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 349.; Douglas Thompson, Stephen Ward, Scapegoat: They All
Loved Him (Chicago: John Blake, 2014), 150.

Tom Morgan, “The Spy Files: Lord Boothby’s Sordid Sex Parties with Ronnie Kray Revealed in
MI5 Files,’ The Telegraph, October 23, 2015,

kray-mi5-documents.html.

Adam Curtis, “The Mayfair Set: Four Stories about the Rise of Business and the Decline of
Political Power,’ BBC, July-August, 1999, video,

Snider, A Special Relationship, 264-26.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 268.

Rebecca Pocklington, “Secret Society: The Sex, Secrets and Spies Rumours Surrounding
Prince Philip's Wild Thursday Club, as Portrayed in The Crown,’ The Sun, February 12, 2020,

story-inside-sex-secrets-spies/.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 270-71.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 288-89.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 288-89.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 387.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 387.

Summers and Dorril, Honeytrap, 189.

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996), 229-
30.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 356-59.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 360-63.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 364.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 364-65.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 366.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 364-66.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 230.

Robert Sherrill, “King Cohn,’ The Nation, August 12, 2009,
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/king-cohn/.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 345-46.
Snider, A Special Relationship, 345-46.
“Broady Found Guilty In Wiretapping Case,’ New York Times, December 9, 1955,

168

169

170

171

172
173

174
175
176
177

178

179

180

181

182
183
184
185

186

187

188

189

190

H. P Albarelli, Leslie Sharp, and Alan Kent, Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who
Killed JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021), 229-32.

Douglas Caddy, “Clendenin J. Ryan - Baltimore Millionaire and CIA Funder,’ The Education

ryan-baltimore-millionaire-and-cia-funder/.
“Home - The George Town Club,’ The George Town Club, https://www.georgetownclub.org/.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the
Bahamas (Routledge, 1991), 85-102.

Gary Webb, The Killing Game (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 106.
“House Select Committee on Assassinations Appendix to Hearings,’ March 1979. Vol. 9,

Bock, Masters of Paradise Island, 85-102.

“Guterma Died Taking Just One More Gamble,’ Fort Lauderdale News, April 9, 1977.

Wheeler and Lambert, “Cohn: Is He A Liar?,” 100.

“United States of America, Appellee, v. Virgil D. Dardi, Robert B. Gravis, Charles Rosenthal and

Charles Berman, Defendants-Appellants, 330 F.2d 316 (2d Cir. 1964), Justia Law, March 17,

Hearings, Reports and Prints of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, 1964,
i299,

ee ee ee ee eee ee and Prints of the Senat/9T-

c4AAAAIAAS

“US vs. Dardi”

“Decisions and Reports: Volume 40,’ Securities and Exchange Commision, 1960, p. 936,

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/United States Securities and Exchange Com

mission D?id=4z2-9QYg4X4C.

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American

Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 101.

Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 52.

Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 101.

“Decisions and Reports,’ 938.

Regarding CIC’s intelligence connections: Scott, Deep Politics, 168-69; Alfred Friendly, “Four

Agencies Probe Act of Chiang’s United States Contractor,’ Washington Post, September 10,

1951, printed in P.11066-67. Senate Congressional Record,

https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1951/09/10,

“Memorandum In The Matter of The Bon Ami Company: File No. 1-685,” Securities and

Exchange Act Release no. 34 - 6677, 1934, p. 3, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?

id=YhM7AQAAMAAJ.

J. C. Louis and Harvey Yazijian, The Cola Wars, 1st ed (New York: Everest House, 1980), 302.

“Letter from Louis Mortimer Bloomfield to Carlo d‘Amelio,’ January 26, 1961,

https://archive.org/details/Damelio.

Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

(New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co, 2000), 298.

Jonathan Marshall, “Wall Street, the Supermob and the CIA,” Lobster, May 2022,

CHAPTER 5

SHADES OF GRAY

THE PR MAN

‘kK the Koreagate scandal of the 1970s is largely forgotten, despite the lurid

headlines it inspired at the time. Shadowy intelligence operatives, slush
funds, kickbacks, complicated schemes to buy political loyalty, and rumors of sex
and blackmail were just some of the themes that swirled around Koreagate and
the man at its center, Tongsun Park.

As noted in the previous chapter, Park had studied at Georgetown University,
where he developed close ties to certain groups of young conservative activists.
While there, he was also recruited by the KCIA, the Korean intelligence
apparatus. After graduating, Park became a well to-do businessman in the DC area
as well as a social gadfly, forming connections with congressmen, senators, and
staffers on both sides of the political aisle.

What became known as Koreagate was said to have begun when Chung Il
Kwon, South Korea's prime minister, tasked the head of the KCIA, Kim Hyong-
uk, with devising an operation to influence political opinion in the United States.
The resulting scheme entailed the services of Park, who was then brokering rice
sales contracts from the US to South Korea under the auspices of the
government's Food for Peace program. Working with Congressman Richard T.
Hanna - who represented California, one of Americas largest rice-producing
states — Park utilized the commissions on these sales to peddle influence. He
called upon his impressive network of contacts, who were interwoven throughout
the offices of powerful Washington businesses and institutions, as well as the
private clubs and backrooms of the capital, to carry out his series of kickbacks and
bribes.

Appearing on the periphery of Koreagate — at least as far as the official
investigation was concerned — was one of Park’s close associates, the powerful

lobbyist and Public Relations executive Robert Keith Gray. Across the course of
his lengthy and impressive career, Gray was adept at the art of influence peddling.
The breadth of his associates ran from Korean CIA operatives such as Park to US
CIA agents such as Edwin P. Wilson and soon-to-be CIA director William Casey.
Among his other close associates and/or clients were Adnan Khashoggi, Robert
Maxwell, the Teamsters, and BCCI (the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International), among many others. It all added up to Gray acting as a key node in
a shadowy network that was becoming increasingly aligned, and integrated, with
the halls of power. Gray’s name would often bubble up alongside numerous
scandals, with Koreagate being just one. Others would include Watergate, the
largely forgotten pageboy scandal of 1982, and the Iran-Contra affair.

Gray hailed from Hastings, a moderately sized industrial town nestled in the
Nebraskan countryside, about two and half hours west of Omaha. Early on, he
showed an interest in politics and was an avid participant in his high school debate
club. After his graduation in 1939, he and several members of his debate club
attended Carleton College in Minnesota; his chosen area of study was political
science. A year later, with World War II looming on the horizon, the US Navy
launched its V-7 program, which was a rapid-training course for naval officers. V-7
worked closely with universities across the United States, and Gray quickly
enlisted.

The next couple of years were a whirlwind for Gray. He attended the Navy
Supply Corps Midshipmen Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, and found
time to take business management courses at Harvard. This threefold educational
path — politics, business, and adjacency to the military - became defining
characteristics of the rest of his long and storied career. Yet, it would be some time
before he was able to make a name for himself.

After the war he bounced back to Hastings, where he worked at the naval
depot that had been built there. He spent his free time building social capital: he
taught business courses at Hastings College and joined many of the city’s
organizations and social clubs (including the local Masonic lodge).+

During this second period in Hastings, Gray became acquainted with Fred
Seaton, owner of the Hastings Tribune and a powerful figure in Nebraskan politics.
Gray then served as a state senator before serving as President Eisenhower's
assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs. He brought few things with him to
the capital - among them Seaton’s contact information. Seaton managed to find

Gray a position in the vast complexes of the post-war bureaucracy. He went to
work in the Pentagon, serving as a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of the
Navy Albert Pratt.

Gray received a promotion in May 1956, which propelled him higher in the
strata of power within the Eisenhower administration. He became a special
assistant to the White House, acting as deputy to Seaton. Yet, as Susan Trento
points outs in The Power House, there may have been more to this position than
meets the eye. He had been designated as an “excepted appointment,” which
means that, in lieu of a standard promotion, he had “been simply detailed to the
White House from the Navy”?

If Gray was still technically working for the Navy while at the White House, it
is likely that his new position involved intelligence and security concerns. His
primary task was to sift through reams of data in connection with Washington job
seekers. “Gray,” Trento writes, “was controlling the flow of information about
everyone looking for patronage, or political jobs, at a federal level”? A significant
amount of this information was marked “highly confidential,’ which gave Gray an
inside track on government power.

Soon, he was working under Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff.
Adams was an early Rockefeller Republican and a master bureaucrat. He was
known for regulating access to the president: nobody, it was said, could speak to
Eisenhower without Adams’ approval. He made up an inner core of Eisenhower
cronies that included Floyd Odlum and George Allen - powerful, politically
connected businessmen whose interests existed in immediate proximity to the
emergent “military industrial complex,” as Eisenhower would later call it, as well as
the increasingly brazen intersection of intelligence and business interests. This was
the world that Gray was easing his way into under the tutelage of Adams.

After the untimely departure of Adams under the cloud of scandal, Gray
gained a new mentor — Richard Nixon. This was Gray’s introduction into an
expanded network of contacts that shaped the trajectory of the rest of his life. In
1960, he went to work on the ill-fated Nixon presidential campaign, perhaps
encountering for the first time his future friend William Casey. He also became
associated with Clark Clifford in this period; Clifford, a Democratic Party insider
and archetypal cold warrior, was one of DC’s elite attorneys and had an extensive
Rolodex.

Decades later, Clifford was among the numerous US political and business
figures implicated in the BCCI scandal, the subject of chapter 7. Beginning in the
early 1980s, Clifford served as chairman of the board of First American
Bankshares, a major DC-based bank that had fallen under the secret control of
BCCI via their takeover of the bank’s parent company. As Edward Jay Epstein has
pointed out, First American was a bank used by numerous congressmen and other
political figures — control of the bank created possible blackmail opportunities.
Shortly after Clifford took control of First American, Gray joined the bank’s board
of directors.

Following John F. Kennedy’s defeat of Nixon in 1960, Gray left government
service for a position at Hill & Knowlton (H & K), a major public relations and
lobbying firm that had been launched in the 1920s by John Hill and Donald
Knowlton. While H & K would become synonymous with the inner conflicts and
flashy affairs of the DC Beltway - with clients including everyone from
presidential hopefuls to BCCI - in the early days, it was a Cleveland-based
company with a particular focus on the local steel industry and the banks that
financed it.2

In the aftermath of World War II, H & K became a major promoter of the
aviation industries that were then benefitting from the fusion of American heavy
industry and the US military. John Hill, for example, was a member of the Air
Power League, a pressure group formed by a large coterie of businessmen and
military officers with the goal of educating the public about aviation and raising
support for the construction of “greater airport facilities and air training
programs.” The league was closely aligned with the Aviation Industries
Association (AIA), the major aviation trade association that H & K had taken on
as a client. Such connections firmly ensconced H & K within the military-
industrial complex, as the Encyclopedia of Public Relations makes clear:

“The [Aviation Industries Association] sought a steady diet of military appropriations for its
member companies, and it promoted air safety, travel, and other aspects of civil aviation. After
the war ended, military contracts took a nosedive, so the agency focused on convincing the
federal government to audit the nation’s air policies and its readiness for another war. When
both Congress and President Harry S. Truman set up commissions to review air policy, Hill &
Knowlton helped industry officials prepare their testimony and publicize the board’s findings.
Joining with the American Legion, the AIA sponsored a campaign, “Air Power is Peace Power,”

beginning in 194778

H & K was also linked, it seems, to the CIA. Robert Crowley, a longtime
operator within the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, stated that the firm's
“overseas offices were perfect ‘cover’ for the ever-expanding CIA”? Crowley would
have been in a position to know: he acted as the CIA's “liaison” to the business
world, which entailed the use of existing businesses as covers for agents abroad
and the creation of proprietary firms to act as fronts.!? Crowley may even have
helped bring a young George H.W.Bush into the CIA's fold, as Bushs Zapata
Petroleum served as an Agency front for various Caribbean operations during
Crowley’s time as an Agency liaison. Gray himself was likely tied directly to
these efforts. When Edwin Wilson checked with the CIA’s Office of Security prior
to adding Gray to the board of a CIA front called Consultants International, “he
discovered that Gray had already been cleared by the spy agency — that Gray had

previous clearances.”!2

INSIDE THE GEORGE TOWN CLUB

Des the 1960s Gray became aligned with a powerful bloc of interests
known as the China Lobby. An early Cold War equivalent of today’s Israel
Lobby, the China Lobby represented the Nationalist Chinese — the Kuomintang
(KMT) - and their supporters in Washington. The China Lobby called for US
support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s government in Taiwan against the Chinese
Communists led by Mao Zedong. In its most extreme form, this support entailed
militarized intervention in mainland China and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. As
scholars such as Peter Dale Scott have shown, many of these activities set in
motion a complex chain of events that later cascaded into the Vietnam War.

One of the strongest actors in the China Lobby was Anna Chennault, who
cultivated contacts with countless politicians, businessmen, military figures, and
intelligence officers. She held positions on the boards of numerous companies and
acted as an advisor to various US presidents. She also served as a diplomatic
channel to the leaders not only in Taiwan but in South Korea, the Philippines,
Japan, and elsewhere. Gray was particularly close to Chennault, though the exact
details of how the two first met are unknown.

Anna Chennault’s husband had been Claire Chennault, the leader of the First
American Volunteer Group — better known as the “Flying Tigers” — during World
War II. With ranks drawn from the US military, the Flying Tigers trained at bases

maintained in Burma before flying to China to fight Japanese forces alongside the
KMT. From the late 1930s, Claire Chennault had served as a military advisor to
Chiang Kai-Shek and his brother-in-law, the powerful T. V. Soong.

As previously detailed in Chapter 1, Claire Chennault was a very well-
connected man and this included ties to the Roosevelt administration. After the
war, the Chennaults became the core members of the China Lobby and, in those
early years, managed an impressive airlift of “American relief supplies in China.’
Central to this effort had been the creation of a new airline called Civil Air
Transport (CAT). As previously noted, CAT would later morph into the CIA
airline Air America, which would subsequently become the infamous Southern
Air Transport.

There were also other airline companies in this mix. As was also noted in
Chapter 1, an air freighter called Flying Tiger Lines was set up by a coterie of
Claire Chennault’s former pilots, and Anna Chennault joined the company as its
vice president of international affairs. Evidence suggests that Flying Tiger Lines
was also utilized by the CIA, and its board of directors included individuals linked
to organized crime.} At the same time, Anna acted as a consultant to numerous
large aviation concerns, including Pan American, whose interests directly
intermingled with those of the CIA’s CAT/Air America complex./° At any rate,
Flying Tiger Lines remained squarely in the fold of the China Lobby and its
numerous allies. “Over the years,” writes Susan Trento, “Flying Tiger ... would
evolve into World Airways, and Gray would become a board member? +

Gray’s early political mentor, the future president Richard Nixon, was also an
ally of the China Lobby. Many journalists and academics have identified Nixon as
being a “member” of the lobby, but a 1992 academic paper suggests that his
involvement with them was more pragmatic than ideological.+* He fostered good
relations with Chiang Kai-Shek and T. V. Soong, which spilled over into business
arrangements during the 1960s, when Nixon temporarily left politics for private
law. One of his biggest clients was Pepsi, the Taiwanese interests of which were
firmly held by members of Soong’s family.*?

All of this provides a backdrop to the creation of the George Town Club in
March 1966. Its main organizers included Gray, Park, and Chennault, along with
Henry Preston Pitts, Lawrence Merthan, and General Graves B. Erskine. The Club
was Officially established “for the purpose of bringing together leaders who had an
impact on the United States, and the world, through their work in various

business, professional, civic, social and political milieus.”22 Pitts and Merthan,
according to the Washington Post, worked alongside Gray at H & K at the time of
the club’s founding.~4 By the time the Koreagate hearings began in the late 1970s,
Pitts had left H & K and gone to work for the US Information Agency, the once
covert body set up during the Eisenhower administration to direct “public
diplomacy” and Cold War propaganda.

Erskine had a lengthy career in the world of intelligence and covert
operations. In 1950, he ran the military wing of the Survey Mission to Southeast
Asia, which brought him into close contact with the anti-Communist interests
that were aligned with the domestic China Lobby. Working closely with
representatives of Nationalist China, he developed a military strategy to support
KMT fighters in Burma and their allies in Thailand. This was the birth of
Operation Paper, which marshaled the resources of CIA operatives such as the
mob-linked banker and OSS veteran Paul Helliwell. Arms flowed to Thailand
and Burma aboard ships chartered by Sea Supply, a front company organized by
Helliwell, while others were procured through the shadowy World Commerce
Corporation. Peter Dale Scott has argued that Operation Paper was a key point in
the development of US intelligence complicity in the global drug trade — at the
very least, it marked a major instance of intelligence’s indirect support for drug
traffickers.”

In 1953, Erskine became the director of Special Operations at the Department
of Defense. This put him in charge of an obscure office within the Pentagon that
served as the liaison between the armed forces and the CIA. Here, Erskine
oversaw an ever-increasing number of covert operations and special wars dotting
the globe. Operating under Erskine was the infamous Edward Lansdale, America’s
architect of guerrilla warfare and psychological operations in the post-war era.
When Erskine suffered a heart attack in 1957 and took a protracted leave from the
Special Operations office, Lansdale stepped in and ran it in his stead.

The intersection of the George Town Club’s membership with China Lobby
interests and skilled operators in the world of covert intelligence was apparently
unending. The manager of the club, for example, was Norman Larsen. Larsen had
previously worked in the Washington offices of the Life Line Foundation, one of
the charitable bodies owned by Texas oilman and financier of right-wing causes,
H. L. Hunt. Other recipients of Hunt's largess included Foreign Intelligence

Digest, a private intelligence magazine organized and edited by Douglas
MacArthur's former intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby.

While Willoughby operated far from the environs of the George Town Club,
numerous authors have highlighted his linkages to the wider China Lobby
network. David Clayton, for example, writes that the lobby “was intrinsically tied
to advocates of [a foreign policy of] rollback ... and to MacArthur, through his
intelligence chief General Charles Willoughby,” while Harvey Klehr writes that
Willoughby was a “China Lobby ally’2° And Peter Dale Scott writes that “others
who used [Joseph] McCarthy to settle old scores included the Chinese
Nationalists of the China Lobby, their spokesman Alfred Kohlberg, and General
MacArthur's Prussian-born intelligence chief in Japan, General Charles
Willoughby. The expansive nature of this network can also be illustrated by
Norman Larsen’s membership in the International Youth Federation for Freedom,
a “non-profit anti-Communist group” that appears to have had some working
relationship with the CIA. The International Youth Federation for Freedom was
founded by none other than Tongsun Park, along with his close friend and college
roommate Douglas Caddy.

Park, in his Koreagate testimony, makes passing reference to Caddy, noting
that Caddy - who would appear later in the course of the Watergate scandal by
serving briefly as E. Howard Hunt's attorney — had been the executive director of
the Young Americans for Freedom. As noted in the previous chapter, Young
Americans for Freedom had been organized by former CIA officer, close friend of
Roy Cohn, and National Review founder William F. Buckley and counted Charles
Willoughby on its advisory board.

When Park mentioned Caddy in his testimony, it was during a line of
questioning concerning a man who later figured heavily in the clandestine
espionage activities of Robert Maxwell: Senator John Tower. Tower, who was also
a member of the George Town Club, had been particularly close to Park. “I was a
friend of the [Tower] family,’ Park stated, before noting Tower's involvement in
“helping Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded by one of my closest
friends.”22 The “closest friend” alluded to here was Caddy.

A State Department telegram concerning the George Town Club reports that,
for the first six years of its existence, the club had operated in the red.
Nevertheless, it managed to stay afloat, apparently through the intercession of its
owners. The governing board was “divided ... equally between the Democratic

and Republican parties.’ The telegram goes on to state that, at the time, Clark W.
Thompson had been serving as chairman of the club’s board. Thompson was the
quintessential moderate Texas Democrat, having served for some three decades as
one of the state’s representatives. Working both sides was Thompson’s forte. For
instance, when it came to the issue of school desegregation, he broke with most of
his colleagues who opposed it, while he also voted against the Civil Rights Acts of
1957 and 1960.

A careful examination of Thompson’s affiliations reveals links to the worlds of
organized crime and intelligence. Thompson was married to the daughter of
William Lewis Moody Jr., a key player in the world of Texas finance and insurance.
Moody’s flagship firm was American National Insurance Company (ANICO),
founded in Galveston, Texas, in 1905. The Moodys were briefly mentioned in the
last chapter as Moody’s grandson, Shearn Moody Jr., was a close friend and client
of Roy Cohn. According to a mutual friend of Cohn’s and Moody’s, the “eccentric”
Moody supplied Cohn with “many little boys of the night,” which he also he did
for other specific guests who visited his Texas ranch.*2

Thompson had served on the board and as ANICO’s treasurer during the
1920s but departed when he entered politics. At the same time that he was serving
as chairman of the George Town Club, he had rekindled ties to the conglomerate
and was listed as its official lobbyist.24 Morris Shenker, best known as Jimmy
Hoffa's attorney, was also ANICO’s attorney for a time and he helped bring the
insurance firm into the mob-dominated world of Las Vegas hotels and casinos. As
Sally Denton and Roger Morris write, “ANICO ... funneled untold millions into
Las Vegas gambling interests, including $13 million to Shenker himself ... and,
most significantly, to Parvin-Dohrmann — the company that owned the Stardust,
Aladdin, and Fremont.” It certainly helped that E. Parry Thomas, the man
credited with establishing the Las Vegas strip, was closely aligned with Marriner
and George Eccles, the offspring of a prominent Mormon banking and
construction family (e. g., Marriner served as President Roosevelt’s Federal
Reserve chief). George Eccles maintained a spot on the board of ANICO and
nurtured ties to a number of ventures that were, at the very least, adjacent to
organized crime.

George Eccles was also afhliated with American Bankers Life Assurance
Company, located in Miami, Florida, where the CIA’s Paul Helliwell served as its
general counsel. Furthermore, the offices of American Bankers Life were used by

Helliwell as headquarters for the Agency’s SEA Supply operation.“ In addition to
this important CIA linkage, American Bankers Life also connected to Miami
National Bank. As discussed in Chapter 1, Miami National “was identified in 1969
as having served between 1963 and 1967 as a conduit through which ‘hot’
syndicate money was exported by Meyer Lansky’s couriers and ‘laundered’
through the interlocking Exchange and Investment Bank in Geneva.”25

Clearly, the George Town Club was nestled within a wider network of entities
and institutions that were very sensitive to Washington backroom politics,
organized crime, and the CIA. Perhaps that is why, as reported in numerous
accounts, the CIA became concerned that one of the main figures behind the club
was Tongsun Park, a known asset of the Korean CIA. While the KCIA and the
CIA were cooperating entities, the KCIA did engage in activities — such as those
that later blossomed into the Koreagate scandal — that were seen as compromising
US political figures and also seen as potentially disruptive for US geopolitical
interests. As a result, the CIA dispatched an agent to monitor the club’s comings
and goings. That individual was Edwin P. Wilson, a man who would become
known as a “rogue” agent roughly a decade later, after he was linked to various
terrorist and assassination plots.

A sizable portion of Wilson's early career in the CIA entailed operating
undercover as a staffer for the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the large union combine known as a
proponent of “business unionism.’ Since the Agency's inception, the Agency and
the AFL-CIO had worked closely together, with the union providing cover for
agents and operations, while the CIA often subsidized the activities of the AFL-
CIO's foreign wings.2° Wilson worked in the office of Paul Hall, the head of the
AFL-CIO’s Maritime Trades Department, which covered unions involved in
shipping-related trades and industries. This was the beginning of Wilson's long-
running involvement in maritime activities.

After leaving the AFL-CIO, his work for the CIA involved the management of
proprietary firms, many of which operated in the world of shipping, freight
forwarding, and logistics. One of the first of these was Maritime Consultants,
which had been set up in Washington, DC with CIA funds. According to Joseph
Trento, “within months he was chartering barges to Vietnam, arranging cover in
commercial businesses for CIA agents, and setting up businesses around the
world. Using his maritime cover, Wilson did detailed surveys of nearly every port

in Africa and the Pacific.”24 One wonders if Wilson’s involvement with the George
Town Club had less to do with monitoring the activities of Gray, Park, and
Chennault and more to do with managing the complexities of these covert
maritime operations. It is certainly possible, given Gray’s own past with the Navy.
In addition, Wilson’s business in Vietnam would have gained considerably from
contacts with Anna Chennault, who was closely connected to the government and
elsewhere in Southeast Asia. At any rate, the arrival of Wilson at the George Town
Club marked the beginning of a long association between him and Gray.

There were, for example, their trips to Taiwan, where each had business
interests — interests that, in all likelihood, were interrelated. Wilson gained
lucrative contracts from the Nationalist Chinese military, while Gray signed on
the Taiwanese government as a client. The account was entrusted to George
Murphy, an actor who became a US Senator representing California, but, at the
time, was an H & K employee. Curiously, Gray routed the work through a separate
company that he set up specifically for these purposes, called GM (presumably for
Gray-Murphy). Susan Trento writes that “according to Wilson, Gray set up ...
GM to handle the Taiwanese account. Since Anna Chennault trusted Murphy,
Gray put the senator in charge of GM.”$8 Murphy, unsurprisingly, was a member
of the George Town Club.

Some of Wilson and Gray’s joint activities dovetailed with those of the CIA.
Gray was a board member of Consultants International, a firm that Wilson
managed from offices adjacent to those of H & K on K Street in the capital. Gray
later disavowed knowing Wilson and stated that he had been added to the board
of Consultants International without Gray’s knowledge. Gray’s account is hard to
believe and many of those embedded in this network, including H & K employees
and Wilson himself, have pushed back against Gray’s interpretation of events. At
any rate, Consultants International was not simply a consultancy firm. It was also
an Agency proprietary firm, set up as a successor to Wilson's earlier CIA front
company, Maritime Consulting.*2

There are plenty of hints and suggestions that Gray, Wilson, Park, and the
byzantine web of China Lobby activists and intelligence operatives that circulated
around the George Town Club were involved in more than just social networking
and the creation of lobbying groups. Eavesdropping and blackmail seem to have
been part of the club’s covert mandate. Future Reagan national security advisor
Richard Allen — who would have known Gray through the involvement of each in

the Heritage Foundation — suggested when interviewed by Susan Trento that the
club was bugged.*2 Jim Hougan, in his classic Secret Agenda, points to even darker
possibilities. He writes that he was informed in a letter from Frank Terpil, Wilson’s
longtime partner, that Wilson had used the club to collect dirt on prominent
Washington politicians and businessmen by using it as a place to “arrange trysts

1744

for the politically powerful.’ He quotes from the letter:

Historically, one of Wilson’s Agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress]
by any means necessary.... Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual
fantasies in the flesh.... A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via
selected cameras, I’m sure for historical purposes only. The technicians in charge of filming
[were] TSD personnel. The unwitting porno stars advanced in their political careers, some of
[whom] may still be in office. You may now realize the total ineffectiveness of the “Watchdog

Committees” assigned to oversee clandestine operations.

Former Nebraska state senator John DeCamp, in his work on the Franklin
scandal (the subject of chapter 10), alleges that Gray was the “closest friend in
Washington” of Harold Andersen, the publisher of the Omaha World Herald who
was alleged to have played a role in that scandal, which dealt with a politically-
connected, nationwide pedophile ring. DeCamp also notes that Andersen was
one of the key Nebraskans who was closely tied to the man at the center of
Franklin scandal, Larry King, who was also actively aided by George H.W.Bush in
rehabilitating his post-scandal image*+

DeCamp, who attempted to expose government efforts to sweep the scandal
under the rug in The Franklin Cover-Up, also asserted that Gray himself was
“reportedly a specialist in homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA.”
DeCamp also wrote that the sexual-blackmail operations in which Gray’s associate
Edwin Wilson was intimately involved were “apparently continuing the work of a
reported collaborator of Gray from the 1950s - McCarthy committee counsel Roy
Cohn.”* Cohn and Gray reportedly knew each other, but the exact nature of their
relationship is difficult to discern. They were, however, most certainly intimately
acquainted during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, when both men
worked closely with William Casey, who was the campaign’s manager and
subsequently Reagan's CIA director. Shortly after the campaign, Cohn, Gray and
Jeffrey Epstein would all take on arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi as a client at the
dawn of the Iran-Contra affair.

THE CIA’S BLONDE GHOST

dwin Wilson ostensibly left the CIA in 1971 under incredibly murky

circumstances, though the most common story involves his commercial cover
being blown by a Soviet asset. Per the media narrative that was spun during the
course of the manhunt for Wilson and his subsequent imprisonment, Wilson is
said to have cut ties with the Agency and become a covert private operator for hire
— a “rogue.” Yet, evidence released not only during his trial but well after its
conclusion shows that Wilson remained in close contact with a cadre of CIA
officers and officials whose activities, as the 1970s wore on and the Agency was
battered by reformists’ efforts, took on increasingly strange and frightening forms.
This circle was centered around the man known as the “blonde ghost,’ Theodore
“Ted” Shackley.*®

Shackley, like Wilson, came from a background somewhat different from the
usual CIA leadership, which tended to cultivate its upper ranks from the posh
world of white-shoe law firms and high finance. He instead hailed from Florida
and began his career in the Army; his recruitment into the CIA came after a stint
in the Army Counterintelligence Corps. By 1953, he was working under William
Harvey at the West Berlin CIA station. Here, Shackley operated at the very
frontier of the Cold War: the West Berlin station's activities were carried out under
the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and the city was a veritable melting pot of
espionage intrigue. While working under Harvey, Shackley may have gotten a
taste for the more “exotic” aspects of CIA work. After he returned to the States,
Harvey managed a CIA assassination team — with many of its members having
been mob hitmen recruited into Agency service under the auspices of the
ZR/RIFLE program.

Harvey's assassination activities were woven into Operation Mongoose, the
joint CIA-Army covert war against Castro’s Cuba. The central hub of the CIA's
side of the anti-Castro operations was the Miami station, code-named JM/WAVE.
Tucked away in an unassuming building on the extended campus of the University
of Miami, the station “employed from 300 to 700 agents and 2,000 to as many as
6,000 Cubans.”“4 In 1962 — right as the CIA’s Cuban project was spiraling toward
its violent apex — Shackley became JM/WAVE's station chief. Joseph Trento
asserts that, in this period, Shackley was mentored in the fine of art of covert
financial activities by Paul Helliwell: “Helliwell showed Shackley ... the

importance of income from Agency fronts. According to numerous case offices
who worked at JM/WAVE, Helliwell helped Shackley make certain that fronts like
Zenith Technical Enterprises were the perfect cover for JM/WAVE.”*8

These allegations are partially corroborated by other sources. The Washington
Post, for instance, reported in 1980 that Helliwell “was instrumental in helping to
direct a network of CIA undercover operations and ‘proprietaries.”*2 Curiously,
one of the only declassified CIA documents to mention Helliwell is a list of files
removed from internal circulation in order to avoid turning them over to
Watergate investigators.°2 Almost all of the other files in the list deal directly with
the CIA’s support of anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

JM/WAVE was where Shackley formed close relationships that would shape
the rest of his long career, both inside the Agency and out. Chief among
Shackley’s alliances that were forged via JM/WAVE was with Thomas Clines, who
later emerged as a key player in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. Clines served as
Shackley’s deputy, even after both men stepped beyond the confines of the CIA
itself. There was also a score of Cuban exiles: the notorious Felix Rodriguez
(known for his involvement in the death of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara
and his own role in Iran-Contra), Rafael Quintero, and Ricardo Chavez. Many of
these individuals followed Shackley overseas in 1966, when the “blonde ghost”
was made the CIA station head in Vientiane, Laos. It was a perfect spot for a crew
that was increasingly adept at “wetworks” (i.e. assassinations) and black
operations. This particular station oversaw the Agency’s participation in the secret
war being waged within Laos and Cambodia.

Vientiane, during this period, was the epicenter of a major illicit trade in
contraband, gold, and raw opium, most of it destined for Saigon. Laos boasted a
handful of prominent opium merchants with deep ties to the country’s political
and military establishment. One of these merchants, Ouane Rattikone, had
previously commanded the Laotian army, and his drug trafficking operations saw
extensive collaboration with Nguyen Cao Ky, the high-ranking commander of the
South Vietnamese Air Force. Not only were Ky and his men moving raw opium
from Laos on their planes, but Ky was also working closely with the CIA in their
secret war efforts such as Operation Haylift, which dropped saboteurs deep into
the jungles of North Vietnam. The raw opium was refined into heroin and then
moved into Hong Kong, where it was readied for global export.

This circuit was of immense interest to American organized crime figures. In
1965, Meyer Lansky’s financial agent John Pullman flew to Hong Kong,
reportedly to investigate the burgeoning wartime trade. Several years later, Florida
mob boss Santo Trafficante arrived in Hong Kong and soon made his way to
Saigon. “Soon after Trafficante’s visit to Hong Kong,” writes Alfred McCoy, “a
Filipino courier ring started delivering Hong Kong heroin to Mafia distributors in
the United States. US Bureau of Narcotics intelligence reports in the early 1970s
indicated that another courier ring was bringing Hong Kong heroin into the
United States through the Caribbean, Trafficante’s territory? $

The presence of Trafficante is telling. He had been an active supporter of the
anti-Castro operations, and after the Agency wound down its JM/WAVE
activities, many Cuban exiles trained by the CIA as part of that program went to
work trafficking drugs for Traficante. Was Shackley involved in some way with
Trafficante’s arrival in Southeast Asia? It is possible, as there are plenty of
apocryphal stories about Shackley personally introducing Trafficante to Vang Pao,
a Laotian heroin warlord, during a 1968 trip to Saigon. While the details of those
stories cannot be confirmed, Vang Pao would have had to have known of Shackley,
as he commanded the Hmong troops that were being backed and trained by the
CIA in Laos.

According to McCoy, the CIA's logistical networks allowed Vang Pao to
increase the efficacy of the Laos-South Vietnam opium trade:

Air logistics for the opium trade were further improved in 1967 when the CIA and USAID ...
gave Vang Pao financial assistance in forming his own private airline, Xieng Khouang Air
Transport. The company’s president, Lo Kham Thy, said the airline was formed in late 1967
when two C-47s were acquired from Air America and Continental Air Services. The company’s
schedule was limited to shuttle flights between Long Tieng and Vientiane that carried relief
supplies and an occasional handful of passengers. Financial control was shared by Vang Pao, his
brother, his cousin, and his father-in-law.... Reliable Hmong sources reported that Xieng
Khouang Air Transport was the airline used to carry opium and heroin between Long Tieng and
54

Vientiane.—

This was the crucial context for the formation of a group that would later be
known as Shackley’s “private CIA.” On hand in Laos was Thomas Clines, and
there they soon became acquainted with another future Iran-Contra co-
conspirator — Richard Secord. An Air Force pilot, Secord had been detailed to the
CIA's Laotian station and he personally knew many of those involved in the traffic
of opium via the airways, including the aforementioned Air Marshal Ky.

Another figure, who would also later play a key role in the Iran-Contra affair and
who also worked with Shackley in Laos was Major John K. Singlaub. Singlaub had
served alongside Paul Helliwell in the OSS.

Playing an active role in logistical support for the Agency’s secret war was
Edwin Wilson. Much of this involved a close working relationship with the head
of the Southeast Asian division of the CIA’s Air America, James Cunningham,
who also ultimately answered to Shackley.“° Though Wilson was not stationed in
Southeast Asia, he frequently made trips between Washington and Vientiane.
There can be little doubt that these jaunts of his were of immense interest to Gray,
Park, Chennault, and other members of the China Lobby who populated Wilson's
inner stateside circle. The China Lobby, after all, was wired into the world of
intelligence and had stumped for the escalation of conflict in Southeast Asia, an
escalation that finally erupted into the Vietnam War.

In 1968, Shackley took over the Saigon CIA station, which gave him
operational oversight of a vast gamut of operations — including, for a period, the
infamous Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program, while financed by the CIA,
operated under the auspices of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary
Development Support). Overseeing CORDS was the CIA’s old Southeast Asian
hand and bureaucratic mastermind, William Colby. Rumors among the military's
in-country brass abounded that Shackley exerted influence over Colby through
sexual blackmail. Clearly, Shackley and Wilson, alleged to have been carrying out
similar activities at the George Town Club, were quite similar in this regard:

Colby, then married to his first wife, returned to Vietnam without his family from a stint back in
Langley. According to retired US Army Colonel Tullius Accompura, who served in Vietnam,
Colby had a girlfriend, a Vietnamese senator’s wife. Shackley’s colleagues soon realized that
Shackley was keeping a book on the private lives of all of his superiors in Vietnam, including
Colby and military officers such as General Creighton Abrams, who, according to Accompura,
was involved with a Vietnamese woman. If pressed upon an undesirable topic by a colleague,
Shackley would warn him off by mentioning any personal entanglements. As John Sherwood
put it: “He was good at letting you know he knew, that he had something on you, that he had an

edge”2/

Shackley remained in Saigon until May 1972, when he took over as head of
the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Since Cuba fell under the rubric of this
division, it was something of a return for Shackley to his earlier haunts. Yet, by this
point, the anti-Castro operations had largely fallen by the wayside. There was still
operational support for Cuban exile groups, many of which were factionalizing

into militant terrorist groups such as Coordination of United Revolutionary
Organizations (CORU). The Agency’s eyes were darting farther south, toward
Southern Cone countries like Chile, where socialist leader Salvador Allende had
come to power. From his perch at the top of the Western Hemisphere Division,
Shackley was on the bureaucratic frontline for the 1973 coup that brought
Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile and the parade of dirty wars that ripped
across South America.

Even before Shackley left Saigon, his network of contacts was busy making
arrangements. Thomas Clines - who would soon be embroiled in the Agency’s
ventures in Chile — had left Saigon in 1970 and rotated back stateside to spend
time at the Naval War College. Joining him there was Richard Secord. Secord, in
this period, completed his War College thesis, which had been directed by the
“CIA advisor to the president,” Clarence Huntley. The prescient title of his thesis
was “Unconventional Warfare/Covert Operations as an Instrument of US Foreign
Policy.”

Throughout 1971, Clines kept in touch with Edwin Wilson, who was now
allegedly operating outside of the CIA's purview. It was at that point that Clines
brought Wilson into the realm of naval intelligence by way of a secretive unit
known as Task Force 157.

TASK FORCE 157

he groundwork for what became Task Force 157 (TF-157) was laid in 1965
by a memo drafted by President Johnson's secretary of the navy, Paul Nitze.
Titled “Instructions for the coordination and control of the Navy's clandestine
intelligence collection program,’ Nitze’s program for a naval human intelligence
(HUMINT) gathering apparatus had originated with plans made by Admiral
Rufus Taylor.*® Taylor had served in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) as
well as the National Security Agency (NSA). In 1966, as this new Navy unit was
being prepared for action, he took up a post as deputy director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA). Later that same year, he became deputy of director of
the CIA, serving under Richard Helms.
The first iteration of the Navy’s HUMINT unit, established in 1966, was the
Naval Field Operations Support Group. Author Michael McClintock suggests that
the original template for the unit was Task Force 98, a Navy program that

supported the Southeast Asian paramilitary activities carried out by Ed Lansdale
and Lucien Conein.*? By July 1966, the Support Group was given the mandate to
establish “a worldwide intelligence collection organization while preserving non-
intelligence attributability of collection operations”®2 Internal Navy
communiqués and information sharing identified the Support Group by name;
soon, to help obscure the organization's activities, it was granted the code-name
“Task Force 157.”

TF-157’s primary focus was “intelligence information on Communist Bloc
Naval and shipping information.”™ Subunits were devised and located across the
world; many of these were located in ports, adjacent to shipping channels and
choke points for maritime traffic, and even out at sea. Just as the CIA deployed
commercial covers for their operations, TF-157 set up front companies to charter
ships and maintain offices. Listening posts were established, and TF-157 worked
closely with the military and the CIA in developing improved navigational maps
for the support of military activities. TF-157 even maintained its own
international communication system based on encryption technology inherited
from the NSA, which was code-named the “Weather Channel” 62

TF-157’s operational autonomy was only partial. It answered to both the
Office of Naval Intelligence and the CIA. Though, between the two, the Agency
apparently had an edge for nabbing the various projects that TF-157 developed.
When it came to organizing the networks of proprietary companies, it was again
to the CIA that TF-157 turned. “Ed Wilson is the man you need,” the CIA told the
task force. Wilson, meanwhile, learned of TF-157 from Thomas Clines,
presumably with Ted Shackley lurking not far in the background.“ Soon enough
Wilson was on the TF-157 payroll, making an annual salary of $32,000. Despite
his official salary, Wilson quickly became a multimillionaire.

This was because TF-157 allowed him to keep earnings from the commercial
fronts he set up, which he operated as legitimate businesses. Two of the new front
companies were World Marine Inc. and Maryland Maritime Co. They were
registered in DC and were run from the same offices as Consultants International
— the same company where Robert Keith Gray sat on the board of directors.
There was also Aroundworld Shipping & Charting, based in Houston, Texas,
where Wilson spent a considerable amount of time. Whether Aroundworld was
tied to TF-157 like World Marine and Maryland Maritime or a CIA-adjacent firm
like Consultants International is unknown, but it later played a key role in the

activities of Shackley’s “private CIA.” As Wilson was settling into his new position,
TF-157 was becoming embroiled in one of the major foreign policy shifts of the
Cold War era. Nixon and Kissinger, as part of a broader geopolitical push for
detente — a relaxing of tensions with the Soviet Union and China, alongside
curbing the nuclear arms race — were pushing for an opening with China. The
initiative was treated with the utmost secrecy: while Alexander Haig was involved
in the efforts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA were largely boxed out. For
Kissinger, the success of these China-focused efforts would require the diplomatic
channels and corridors of information to be airtight.

Kissinger appealed to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, then serving as chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Moorer had previously been the chief of Naval
Operations and thus had had operational involvement with TF-157. Moorer
arranged for Kissinger to use the Weather Channel to send encrypted messages
and arrange the necessary diplomatic back channels for this impending
geopolitical shift. What Kissinger did not seem to realize was that Moorer
opposed Kissinger’s bureaucratic wrangling and Nixon's overarching imperative of
circumventing the usual bastions of political power. Moorer also strongly opposed
the initiative itself and was allied with elements of the pro-KMT China Lobby.

THE RADFORD-MOORER AFFAIR

Y oman Charles Radford barely knew Jack Anderson, the famed muckraking

journalist. He was actually more familiar with Anderson’s parents, whom he
had met during a posting in India in 1970. Radford had been raised Mormon, a
faith he shared with the Andersons, and this seems to have kindled a casual
friendship between the young naval officer and the older couple. In 1970, Radford
briefly crossed paths with Jack Anderson himself, having been invited by his
parents to a family reunion. It seemed innocuous enough.

The second time Radford met Anderson was over a year later, in December
1971. Anderson, out of the blue, had contacted Radford and invited him to dinner
at the Empress, a Chinese restaurant in which he owned a stake. Radford later told
Jim Hougan that the reason he took Anderson up on his offer was “because he was
Jack Anderson. He was famous.”® The dinner took place on a Sunday evening.
The following day, Anderson ran in his newspaper column — renowned for the

journalist's intrepid pursuit of insider sources in the fast-paced world of DC - an
article that contained explosive revelations.

Anderson's column brushed right up against the most sensitive undertaking
then being carried out by President Nixon — Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomatic
negotiations with China. One primary channel being used by Kissinger was
Pakistan, which had historically maintained close geopolitical relations with
China. Pakistan's president Yahya Khan was especially close to Beijing and had
garnered extensive military aid from China in the face of Pakistan's rising
hostilities with India. China, likewise, had reason to oppose India. Tensions with
the Soviet Union had been escalating steadily since the Sino-Soviet split, and
Moscow had thrown its weight behind India. The chessboard was full, and Nixon
and Kissinger were stepping carefully into a complex and potentially dangerous
position.

Pakistan’s conflict with India greatly complicated matters for the
administration: outwardly, it took a position of neutrality. In 1971, when martial
law was imposed in East Pakistan by President Khan, the White House made an
announcement: “The United States does not support or condone this military
action.” Behind closed doors, however, it was a very different story. Nixon and
Kissinger had embarked on a covert path of “tilting” toward Pakistan. President
Khan was assured that the administration would “not do anything to complicate
the situation ... or embarrass him.”™

What was unfolding was a truly remarkable series of events. Nixon’s rise to the
Oval Office had been dependent on the support of the domestic China Lobby,
and he personally maintained close relations with the KMT’s top leadership. The
Kissinger-led initiative toward China undermined all of that. In the course of his
ongoing negotiations with China, Kissinger was tacitly abandoning the hawkish
iterations of a pro-Taiwanese foreign policy. The administration, he said, wasn’t
looking for a “two Chinas” solution or a “one China, one Taiwan” solution”®8
There was also talk of committing the US military to an exit strategy from
Vietnam and a reduction of the US troop presence in the Middle East.

The diplomatic channels of these negotiations were fragile, complex, and,
most of all, secret. Nixon and Kissinger strove to keep the agenda hidden. The CIA,
the State Department, the Joint Chiefs, the China Lobby itself - and even Soviet
interests — were recognized as threats to the long-term plan. But Anderson, in his
column, nearly scuttled it all. In a single article, he revealed that, despite the

carefully calculated public position of neutrality, the “tilt” toward Pakistan was
well underway. It threatened to reveal the diplomatic back channel while also
putting a question into people's minds: Why, exactly, was the US tilting toward
Pakistan?

Journalist Clark Mollenhoff - who served as special counsel to Nixon in 1969
— summed up the implications of Anderson's reporting in a column published on
January 22, 1972. “Kissinger’s role in the India-Pakistan policy seems to be faulty,’
he wrote, before adding that “there is a question of why the administration was
secretly advocating a ‘tilt for Pakistan’ when India was able to prove far quicker its
overwhelming military superiority. Mollenhoff then sketched out what he saw
as the “bigger picture,’ implicating Nixon and Kissinger’s drive toward extreme
bureaucratic compartmentalization:

At both the State and Defense departments, there is hope that President Nixon will view these
errors as evidence that some changes are needed in the National Security Council's method of
operations. Both departments point out that this isn’t the first time the National Security

Council decisions haven't been supported by a realistic appraisal of the facts” 20

Within the corridors of power, Anderson’s revelations of the “tilt” strategy set
off a firestorm. It was quickly determined that the journalist must have had access
to at least three memos — memos that were highly secret and had only been issued
to a handful of people. Those people were Kissinger himself, Alexander Haig,
Admiral Robert O. Welander (the military assistant for national security affairs to
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Moorer), and Welander’s
assistant, Yeoman Charles Radford. Welander eliminated himself from suspicion
for the leak, as well as Kissinger and Haig. The culprit had to have been Radford;
yet, what happened next only increased the strangeness of the case.

Radford, who had acted as a document courier and aide to members of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, was subjected to a
polygraph test by a Pentagon interrogation specialist.“ When it came to questions
concerning the theft of confidential memoranda from diplomatic pouches and
burn bags, the yeoman became agitated. “The cause of his concern was a very
sensitive operation,’ writes Colodny, which Radford “could not discuss without
the direct approval of Admiral Welander”? Welander had initially kicked off the
investigation into Radford. With allegations of a secret operation surfacing,
however, he moved quickly to try to squash the investigation before it went any

further. The attempt did not succeed, and Radford ended up revealing his role in a
military-led espionage ring.

The yeoman had pilfered confidential files and made copies of “uncounted
documents — just thousands, thousands of documents.’ He made notes on
reports of Kissinger’s meeting with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and other
sensitive documents related to the “China initiative.” These were then turned over
to people working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who used them to learn the inner
workings of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy, bypassing the carefully constructed
blockages on the flow of information within the top tiers of the US government.

Radford would turn the documents over to Admiral Welander who, in turn,
gave them to Admiral Moorer. According to Radford, his contribution “put
Admiral Moorer in a very powerful position [to] anticipate what Kissinger was
going to do and say” in National Security Council meetings.“ Welander later
hinted that Alexander Haig was involved in the ring as well. There was little doubt,
he suggested, that Haig had known of Radford’s meddling with the diplomatic
pouches — and Haig himself had, at times, assigned Radford to accompany
Kissinger on diplomatic trips.

According to Radford, the whole operation was designed to thwart a wide-
ranging conspiracy that was taking root at the highest levels of the foreign policy
establishment. At the center of the conspiracy was Kissinger himself, here
appearing as an alleged agent of the Rockefeller family and the institution where
the Rockefellers carried so much weight, the Council on Foreign Relations. “The
purpose of this alleged conspiracy,” writes Jim Hougan, “was to win the Soviets’
cooperation in guaranteeing the Rockefellers’ ‘continued domination’ over the
world’s currencies — in exchange for which, Radford insists, Kissinger was to
construct a foreign policy that would ensure eventual Soviet hegemony and a one-
world government’? The source of his knowledge about this conspiracy, Radford
said, was Welander and Moorer.

The accusations being made by Radford echo those being made by the John
Birch Society and other groups and actors operating in that same milieu - many of
which were also intimately connected to the KMT-China Lobby. (The
aforementioned Charles Willoughby, for example, made this world his primary
haunt.) Many of the accusations made by John Birch Society affiliates — that
Kissinger himself was a Soviet mole — appeared later in the 1970s, with Frank
Capell’s Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent and Gary Allen's Kissinger: The Secret Side of

the Secretary of State. (Capell, in the 1960s, had worked for Willoughby’s Foreign
Intelligence Digest.) What makes this important is that Moorer himself had
maintained extensive ties to the John Birch Society and related groups. These
ideas intensified in the later part of the 1970s and the 1980s, when he became
affiliated with the American Security Council, the preferred outpost of military
hawks who laid the intellectual groundwork for the so-called Reagan revolution.

There are two puzzling loose threads that are evident when considering the
Radford-Moorer affair. The first is that, due to Kissinger’s use of the TF-157
Weather Channel, Moorer and the Joint Chiefs were already privy to much of the
information concerning the China initiative. Likewise, through Edwin Wilson's
arrival at TF-157, there is the distinct possibility that the CIA was also listening in
and perhaps, as well, Wilsons KMT-China Lobby friends. It is through the China
Lobby, and the incestuous networks of defense hawks, military operatives, and
Washington fixers that these two sides met. Was this network the original source
of Moorer and Welander’s manipulation of Radford?

The second loose thread is that Radford, while admitting to pilfering
thousands of pages of sensitive documentation, fervently denied having leaked the
documents to Jack Anderson. He disavowed a close association with the
journalist, noting that they had only met a handful of times and were distant
acquaintances at best. If it is true that Radford had not leaked the documents, who
did and for what ends?

A likely answer is that Welander or Moorer or somebody working on behalf of
them was responsible for the leak. With the information gained from both the
access to the TF-157 channels and through Radford’s pilfering, they had an inside
look at the “tilt” strategy and its position within a wide-ranging geopolitical
calculus that threatened to shift the entire thrust of the Cold War. Perhaps by
hanging their asset Radford out to dry they had hoped to derail Kissinger’s
process through a calculated leak to Anderson. But what about Anderson himself?
His appearance with Radford at the Empress would then suggest that he was at
least partially complicit in this plot.

Surprisingly, Anderson boasted longstanding ties to the China Lobby. He
seemed particularly close to Anna Chennault: the two had been cofounders of the
Chinese Refugee Relief Organization, a pro-KMT humanitarian agency that
maintained offices at 1612 K Street. This office was just down the street from
Robert Keith Gray’s H & K and the offices of Wilson’s TF-157 fronts. When the

organization was operational, Chennault played the role of president and
Anderson served as its secretary.

There is also the fact that a column of Anderson's had been used to hint at
John F. Kennedy’s connection to the Stephen Ward-connected sex ring that
sparked the Profumo Affair. As mentioned in the last chapter, Anderson had co-
written in the column “Britishers who read American criticisms of Profumo throw
back the question “What high American official was involved with Marilyn
Monroe?” Which was apparently part of a Hoover-connected effort to use sex
blackmail obtained from the broader networks woven throughout the Profumo
Affair against Kennedy. This suggests that Anderson’s column had, on certain
occasions, been weaponized by powerful political factions well before this
particular column in the early 1970s.

It is also worth noting that, in the post-Watergate era, Anderson held accounts
at — and stock in — Diplomat National Bank in DC, where Anna Chennault sat on
the board of directors. The bank was used as a conduit for the Korean CIA and the
closely related Unification Church, which - like Anderson — held bank stock.”
Never one to be far from the action, Tongsun Park “told American friends that he
was behind the bank and that [bank chairman Charles] Kim was his agent.’ This
wasn't the only suspect bank that Anderson was connected to. During the 1960s,
he owned “complimentary shares” of the District of Colombia National Bank,
which had been organized by Democratic Party fixer Bobby Baker and Ed
Levinson, a notorious organized crime insider. Joining Anderson at this bank
was Arthur Arundel. Arundel - who had served under Edward Lansdale in
Southeast Asia — was the son of Pepsi lobbyist Russell Arundel. As mentioned
earlier, Pepsi itself was closely tied to the China Lobby and to the KMT itself.

Even the restaurant used to implicate Radford can be found within this
matrix. Anderson, as mentioned, had a stake in the establishment — yet so did
Anna Chennault. These connections between Anderson and the China Lobby,
curiously enough, are known thanks to a dossier on the journalist compiled by the
White House “plumbers.” Soon enough the “plumbers” would be making history,
and Anderson would be there too. There is every indication that he, like so many
others in this bizarre world, had foreknowledge of the events that were about to
take place, which would later be remembered simply as “Watergate.”

BLACK BAGS AND INSIDE JOBS

n April 1972, Jack Anderson received a dossier from William Haddad with
e a on plans being concocted by the “November group” — “President

Nixon’s personal advertising agency” — to burglarize the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate and other schemes:
surveillance, dirty tricks, and the like. Anderson, for reasons that still remain
vague, appears to have effectively suppressed this information, and he later
mischaracterized the information that Haddad had provided to him.

Others who were provided information by Haddad took it a little more
seriously. A month before Anderson was brought into the fold, Haddad had
alerted the DNC’s head, Larry O’Brien, who in turn put Haddad in touch with the
DNC director of communications John Stewart.®2 In late April, Stewart, Haddad,
and Haddad’s source, a private investigator named A. J. Woolston-Smith, met in
New York City to discuss the accusations. This was roughly a month prior to the
first of the break-ins at the Watergate complex.

William Haddad and A. J. Woolston-Smith were by no means strangers to
intrigue. Haddad was a longtime political insider within the Democratic
establishment and had been particularly close to the Kennedy family. He held
various bureaucratic positions, married a Roosevelt daughter, and made a name
for himself as a muckraker. It was through the latter role that he became close to
Woolston-Smith, whom he employed from time to time. Woolston-Smith had
previously worked for Robert Maheu'’s private detective firm and worked with the
CIA on its resettlement programs for Cuban exiles. Maheu himself was no
stranger to the CIA's secret wars on Cuba — a background shared by countless
individuals interwoven in the Watergate saga - and some investigators have
compiled considerable evidence implicating him in the 1968 assassination of
Robert F. Kennedy.

Woolston-Smith likely came upon the information concerning the DNC via
convoluted networks that snaked across the often incestuous world of private
investigators and security firms. As Jim Hougan details, “Woolston-Smith’s
secretary, Toni Shimon, was the daughter of a Runyonesque former Washington
police detective named Joseph Shimon. A convicted wiretapper in his own right,
Shimon was the partner of one John Lenn in a detective agency named Allied
Investigators Inc. One of the investigators with whom Shimon and Lenn were

allied on a part-time basis was Louis James Russell”82

Russell supplied tips to Jack Anderson and, in late 1971, was employed by
General Security Services. This was the company hired by the DNC to run
security at their Watergate offices, and they would have been the ones tasked with
handling the information Haddad had provided. Shortly after Haddad notified the
DNC of Woolston-Smith’s information, Russell resigned from General Security
Services and went to work for McCord Associates, the security consulting firm
owned by “former” CIA operative James McCord. At that time, McCord was
serving as the head of security for the Committee for the Reelection of the
President (CRP), the fundraising body for President Nixons re-election
campaign. Russell, too, worked part-time for CRP.

McCord was one of the White House “plumbers,” the team put together to
plug, prevent, and investigate information leaks, which were endemic in the highly
paranoid world of 1970s Washington, DC. Operating alongside him was former
FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, another CIA veteran. Yet
another CIA man in “the plumbers” was Frank Sturgis, who had served alongside
Hunt in the Agency’s anti-Castro operations. When McCord and Sturgis were
arrested in the Watergate DNC offices in July 1972, they were accompanied by a
group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles: Virgilio Gonzales, Bernard Baker, and
Eugenio Martinez.

There are a few things about McCord’s background that are worth
mentioning. After a time in the FBI, he joined the CIA, taking a position within
the CIAs Office of Security — the in-house body that monitored the internal
security of the Agency, ran counterintelligence operations, and provided cover or
support for some of the CIA's most sensitive operations. Specifically, McCord was
assigned to the Security Research Staff within the Office of Security. There, he
honed the craft of electronic eavesdropping, surveillance, and “audio
countermeasure programs” to protect sensitive CIA stations and outposts in
Europe. These were all of the sorts of techniques that were brought to bear in the
course of the Watergate burglary. They also raise some important questions — for
example, if McCord was an adept at these sorts of affairs, why were the burglaries
so remarkably sloppy?

McCord had also served as deputy to Paul Gaynor, the longtime head of the
Security Research Staff and a powerful figure within the CIA as a whole. From his
commanding place within the Office of Security, Gaynor played an essential role
in some of the CIA's darkest projects, such as Project ARTICHOKE - a “special

interrogation” program that, with its focus on hypnosis, sensory deprivation,
chemical substances, and “psychological harassment” that was the immediate
forerunner of the notorious MK-ULTRA program.% The groundwork for
ARTICHOKE had been laid by an earlier project, BLUEBIRD, described in CIA
files as experiments involving “drugs and hypnosis” Jim Hougan writes that
Gaynor was reputed to have maintained an extensive array of files on US citizens,
with a particular focus on sexual proclivities; these files were known around the
Agency as the “fag files.’”®° These allegations can be found among the statements
made in the 1975 official report of the Rockefeller Commission, an entire section
of which is dedicated to the file systems maintained by the CIA’s Directorate of
Operations. One telling passage of the report reads:

Miscellaneous files maintained by the Office of Security includes lists of individuals with known
or suspected foreign intelligence connections, files associated with handling defectors (some of
whom may now be US citizens), lists of individuals from whom crank calls have been received
by the Agency, and lists of persons previously charged with security violations. The Office of
Security formerly maintained extensive computer lists of approximately 300,000 persons who
had been arrested for offenses related to homosexuality, but these lists were destroyed in

1973.82

Gaynor’s proclivity for dirt collecting — particularly of the sexual variety —
brought him into contact with Roy Blick, the head of the Washington
Metropolitan Police's so-called morals squad until he was forced into retirement in
the mid-1960s. The morals squad, which today would be called the vice squad,
conducted a series of anti-homosexual campaigns under Blick’s leadership.
According to author Anna Lvovsky, Blick had a penchant for targeting politicians
and other people of influence across the Beltway.®8

His crusading zeal to target homosexuals in the area frequently became the
butt of jokes for those in the know. E. Bennett Williams, a DC attorney who
appeared in the periphery of the Watergate affair, liked to perform a short routine
for the denizens of the after-hours Atlas Club. He would “imitate Blick standing at
the urinal for hours, hoping, praying that a ‘queer’ [Blick’s preferred terminology]
would come along and grab his penis — so he could make a morals arrest, of
course”?

Like Gaynor, Blick kept rigorous logs on numerous private citizens. These
were recorded on index cards that were stacked high in a safe in Blick’s office.
According to Lvovsky, “when he left the department, he threatened to keep the

key’ During the CIA’s own information-collection program on homosexuals
and other “deviants,” police forces across the country were marshaled into the
effort, freely turning over their files and working hand in glove with the Agency.
Yet, when it came to Roy Blick, who was stationed in the nation’s capital,
cooperation with the CIA went beyond just file sharing. Numerous declassified
files show Blick working closely with the CIA. For example, he made his own
contacts at the British embassy available to William Harvey as part of the
counterintelligence operation against the Kim Philby spy ring.

The CIA’ largest domestic espionage operation, which saw the full co-
operation of various police departments and other law enforcement agencies with
the Agency, was called Operation CHAOS. It had been initiated during the
Johnson years to monitor the growing civil rights and antiwar movements. James
Jesus Angleton, the ultraparanoid CIA counterintelligence chief, was the driving
force behind CHAOS’ inception. Multiple subprograms were created, each tasked
with different operational imperatives, and adjacent programs were rallied for
support. One such program was called MERRIMAC, which “involved CIA
infiltration of antiwar/peace groups in the Washington, DC area in order to gather

. information on the organizations, their members, sources of funds, and
plans?”

MERRIMAC provided much of the information it harvested to CHAOS.
MERRIMAC was run from the CIAs Office of Security. As Shane O’Sullivan
points out, McCord was then working as chief of the office’s Physical Security
Division, which would have brought him into direct cooperation with
MERRIMAC and CHAOS.” Interestingly, E. Howard Hunt appears to have been
delivering “sealed envelopes and packages,” believed to contain information on the
White House “plumbers,” to Richard Ober — one of the top CIA officials, then
overseeing Operation CHAOS. O'Sullivan draws other parallels between
McCord’s post-CIA security firm, McCord Associates, and the CIA's proprietary
firms that were involved in MERRIMAC, CHAOS, and more general
counterintelligence concerns.

Chief among these was Anderson Security, set up in 1962 to provide support
for the Office of Security. Even after MERRIMAC was supposedly terminated in
1968, Anderson Security was, as late as 1971, managing infiltration and espionage
of dissident groups in the capital on behalf of the Office of Security. Intriguingly,
Hunt seems to have crossed paths with Anderson Security at the same time that

he was delivering files to Ober, and he brought them on to carry out security
sweeps of the CRP offices.” All of this is highly suggestive that lurking within the
“plumbers” unit was an apparatus connected to long-running CIA information-
collection operations and security matters. The background of James McCord in
the Office of Security certainly makes this possible as does Hunt’s involvement
with Ober and Anderson Security. McCord and Hunt, however, claimed not to
have met until their mutual involvement with CRP.

There are reasons to doubt this. Hunt, for example, had been active in the
CIA's anti-Castro operations. There he had worked alongside David Atlee Phillips,
the eventual chief of the CLA’s Western Hemisphere Division, which encompassed
the Caribbean and Latin America. In January 1961, McCord was temporarily
detailed to Phillips to run a counterintelligence operation against the Fair Play for
Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro activist group.2°

The possibility that McCord and Hunt knew each other because of having
operated in the same web of overlapping CIA operations in the 1950s, raises other
questions. Why were the “plumbers” being stocked with CIA agents, and why was
Hunt turning over information to the CIA? Interestingly, these moves were being
made at a time when Richard Nixon - rightfully suspicious of the Agency — was
seeking to blunt its power. Early plans were made to exclude Richard Helms, the
director of the CIA, from National Security Council meetings.” While the
administration ultimately backed away from these efforts, the administration had
nonetheless engaged in consistent bureaucratic wrangling that induced all sorts of
headaches for the CIA. Part of the reason for this, Kissinger later noted, was that
Nixon “brought to the presidency ... a belief that the CIA was a ‘refuge of Ivy
League intellectuals opposed to him.”28

Regardless of whatever else was going on in this dense fog of palace intrigue,
the house of cards collapsed on June 17 when police officers arrested McCord,
Sturgis, Baker, Martinez, and Gonzalez in the Watergate offices of the DNC.
Martinez was found with a key, which he reportedly attempted to conceal by
swallowing it. The leader of the arresting officers was Carl Shoffler, a detective in
the DC police’s Criminal Intelligence Division. Shoffler, incidentally, had been
nicknamed “Little Blick” by his fellow officers, presumably for having interests and
activities that resembled those of the infamous Captain Roy Blick+ It was soon
revealed that a previous break-in had taken place, that bugs had been planted in

the offices of the DNC, and that McCord had set up a listening post in a rented
room in the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street.

The morning after the break-in, the deputy chairman of the DNC, Sam Gregg,
called the organization's general counsel, a well-known Washington lawyer named
Joseph Califano Jr. Gregg told Califano about the break-in and mentioned that
there was photographic equipment in the offices. Califano advised Gregg that the
DNC should closely cooperate with the DC police. Califano then hung up the
phone and promptly called another of his other top clients. He later said, “I picked
up the phone and called Howard Simons who was the managing editor of the Post,
who was on duty that weekend, and told him there'd been a break-in at the DNC.
We didn’t know who it was, but it looked suspicious” 1%

That the DNC and the Washington Post, soon to be written into history for its
coverage of the Watergate affair, had the same general counsel is a surprising
coincidence — but it’s Califano’s deeper history, and the close relations that he had
forged in the previous decade, that stretch credulity. At the beginning of the
1960s, he worked for the white-shoe law firm Dewey Ballantine — the “Dewey”
being Thomas Dewey — before he was tapped to serve as the special counsel to the
Department of Defense's general counsel. A year later, Califano was promoted to
become special assistant to US Secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance. It was during
this period that Vance had delved into the world of the CIA and the Army’s secret
wars.

While serving as assistant to Vance, Califano was deployed to the numerous
coordinating bodies that brought the CIA and Army together for covert
operations against Castro's Cuba. Internal CIA memoranda and the more recently
declassified “Califano papers” illustrate that his involvement with Operation
Mongoose would have brought him into contact with a wide-ranging cast of
characters, including Edward Lansdale and Ted Shackley. After Mongoose came
to a close, Califano was assigned to its successor, the Interdepartmental
Coordinating Committee of Cuban Affairs. He worked closely with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, as evidenced by memoranda Califano sent to them outlining
“special actions.” Califano had his own assistant who worked alongside him
through the numerous iterations of the anti-Castro coordinating committees — a
young Alexander Haig. Haig later summarized the nature of some of their
activities for historian Gus Russo:

I was part of it, as deputy to Joe Califano and military assistant to General Vance. We were
conducting two raids a week at the height of that program against mainland Cuba. People were
being killed, sugar mills were being blown up, bridges were demolished. We were using fast
boats and mother ships and the United States Army was supporting and training these forces.
This was after the Missile Crisis, when the Cuban Coordinating Committee was set up [in
1963]. Cy Vance, the Secretary of the Army, was [presiding] over the State Department, the

CIA, and the National Security Council. I was intimately involved 123

As late as January 1964, Haig was working with Califano when the lawyer
became the Department of Defense’s “Executive Agent for Cuban Affairs” +% His
mandate in this position was broad and took place during the general winding
down of the Agency’s heavy focus on Cuba. He was involved in the management
and resettlement of Cuban refugees and helped find homes and employment for
scores of CIA-trained exile fighters. This likely would have brought both Califano
and Haig into contact with the future private investigator A. J. Woolston-Smith —
the same Woolston-Smith who had curious foreknowledge of the Watergate
break-ins through his connections to Lou Russell.

And what of the Washington Post itself, whose intrepid journalists Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein so famously broke the case? Originally, Woodward
and Bernstein had worked separately, pursuing leads into the murky world of
“former” CIA agents and shadowy security units like the plumbers. At the behest
of the journal’s leadership — including Howard Simons, who had been contacted
by Califano on the morning after the break-in — the two journalists began to pool
their resources and contacts.

At least, this is the official story. The networks of sources that Woodward and
Bernstein cultivated suggests that other dynamics were in play. There was, for
example, Robert Bennett, the owner of the public relations firm Robert R. Mullen
& Company. Bennett “said ... that he [had] been feeding stories to Bob
Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there would be no
attribution ... to Bennett.42° Mullen & Company was also the firm that E.
Howard Hunt had gone to work for at the suggestion of CIA director Richard
Helms following Hunt’s questionable retirement from the CIA. In addition, the
firm itself was closely aligned with the CIA. An undated Agency summary, drafted
sometime during the Watergate affair, noted that “Robert R. Mullen and
Company has been utilized by the [CIA’s] Central Cover Staff since 1963. ... Mr.
Mullen has provided sensitive cover support overseas for Agency employees and
he was instrumental in the formation of the Cuban Freedom Committee.”°° The

Cuban Freedom Committee was similar to CIA projects like Radio Free Europe
and broadcast anti-Castro propaganda to Cuba. In addition, Robert R. Mullen &
Company's attorney was Edward Bennett Williams, a partner in the same law firm
as Joseph Califano. As an aside, among Williams’ clients was Robert Vesco, whose
frighteningly intricate history — and peripheral role in Watergate — are discussed in
the next chapter.

And what about Woodward himself? Carefully removed from the official
Watergate narrative is Woodward's stint, immediately prior to his career as a
journalist, in the military. After attending Yale, Woodward had gone into the Navy,
where he spent “four years of sea duty as a communications officer.” +22 He served
under two superiors who would go on to land important positions at the
Pentagon. The first of these was Rear Admiral Francis Fitzpatrick, who became the
“assistant chief of naval operations for communications and cryptology” 128 The
second was Admiral Welander — the top assistant to Moorer and associate of Haig
who, as discussed, was a central player in the Radford-Moorer espionage ring. In
August 1969, Woodward, still an enterprising young naval officer, arrived in
Washington, DC. Because of his expertise in communication systems, the military
gave him a post at the Pentagon, where he worked in direct proximity to
Fitzpatrick and Welander. As Len Colodny writes:

Woodward was tasked with overseeing approximately thirty sailors who manned the terminals,
teletypes, and classified coding machines at the naval communication center through which all
Navy traffic flowed, from routine orders to top-secret messages. It was a sensitive position that
afforded Woodward access to more than one hundred communication channels, among them,
according to Admiral Fitzpatrick, the top-secret SR-1 channel through which the Navy sent and

received its most important messages’ 02

We have already encountered SR-1 under its colloquial name of the Weather
Channel, the secret communication system utilized by Task Force 157.
Woodward, in other words, was directly linked to the cable traffic of this
ultrasecret unit, which became connected in one direction to Edwin Wilson,
Robert Keith Gray, and the China Lobby complex and in the other direction to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Nixon administration's internal power struggles
over East Asian policy and overarching bureaucratic organization. Furthermore, in
this position, Woodward would have answered directly to Admiral Thomas
Moorer, who not only made SR-1 available to Kissinger but who had also sought
to undermine Kissinger’s efforts in the China initiative.

According to Colodny’s sources, which included Admiral Moorer himself,
Woodward also acted as a “briefer,” meaning he collected information from a
variety of sources for assimilation and subsequent presentation to his
commanding officers. Moorer was not the only military official who would have
received Woodward's briefings. “On his briefing assignment,” writes Colodny,
“Woodward was often sent across the river from the Pentagon to the basement of
the White House, where he would enter the offices of the National Security
Council. There, Woodward would act as briefer to Alexander Haig” H2

This suppressed connection between Woodward and Haig led Colodny to
suggest that Haig was, in fact, the infamous Deep ‘Throat, the mysterious
informant who provided Woodward and Bernstein with vital bits and pieces of
information. The more recent claims made by Mark Felt, a veteran FBI official, to
have been the real Deep Throat has disturbed the Haig thesis. Felt was certainly in
a position to have known a lot. His posts at the FBI had included, for example,
overseeing the COINTELPRO operations before he became assistant director of
the Bureau in 1972. He also had a personal animus against the administration,
which had passed over him in appointing a new director after J. Edgar Hoover's
death. But, as Colodny’s co-author Robert Gettlin has pointed out, certain
essential pieces of information that Woodward attributes to Deep Throat simply
could not have been known by Felt at that place and time. As a result, it has
been posited that Deep Throat was likely a composite of multiple informants.

CALLS GIRLS AND MOBSTERS

he Watergate scandal was one of the great political imbroglios of the latter
half of the twentieth century. It collapsed an entire administration, set off a
decade of power plays, reform efforts, and bureaucratic changes. It contributed,
along with the deeply unpopular Vietnam War and subsequent revelations of
government skullduggery, to an overwhelming air of distrust on the part of the
American people toward their rulers. Yet, what remains remarkable, despite all of
this, is that the rationale for the break-ins has never been satisfactorily explained.
There are an array of competing explanations and interpretations, even from
the burglars themselves. According to James McCord, the reason they broke in
was to place listening devices in Larry O’Brien’s offices. E. Howard Hunt,
meanwhile, suggested that the team had been dispatched to the Watergate to

unearth evidence of illicit campaign contributions being made to the DNC by
Fidel Castro. However, as Jim Hougan has untiringly pointed out time and again,

112 The FBI never found evidence

there is no evidence to substantiate either claim.
of the purported bugs — which would not have worked anyway. As Hougan writes,
“O'Brien's office was part of the interior suite at the DNC and ... was shielded
from McCord’s ‘listening post’ in the motel across the street from the
Watergate” 13

As for the Castro claims, evidence has never surfaced that the leader of Cuba
was funneling money to Democratic politicians, and it is highly unlikely that this
is what McCord, Hunt, and company were rummaging for. The most likely
repositories for information of this sort — the offices of the DNC treasurer, for
example — were left untouched over the course of the break-ins.

There is also the issue of unexplained evidence, the most important of which
may be the mysterious key in the possession of Eugenio Martinez. At the time of
the burglars’ arrest, the lock that matched the key was not discovered. Yet, in the
subsequent investigation, it was found that the key fit the lock of the office of
Maxine Wells, the secretary to R. Spencer Oliver, whose phone had been tapped.
Hougan states that, according to arresting officer Carl Shoffler, photographic
equipment “was clamped to the top” of Well’s desk.’4“4 Len Colodny asks: “Why
would a Watergate burglar have a key to Wells’ desk in his possession, and what
items of interest to a Watergate burglar were maintained in Wells’ locked desk
drawer?” H5

Intimations that something strange had been afoot involving Oliver's
secretaries was reported early on in Nightmare by veteran journalist Anthony
Lukas. Alfred Baldwin, a former FBI agent hired by McCord to monitor calls
being made from Oliver’s phone at the nearby listening post, stated that the
secretaries were actively using the phone when Oliver, who was frequently away
from the office for long stretches of time, was not present. “Some of these
conversations,” Lukas writes, citing Baldwin, “were ‘explicitly intimate?” H6 Lukas
adds that “so spicy were some of the conversations that they have given rise to
confirmed reports that the telephone was being used for some sort of call-girl
service catering to congressmen and other prominent Washingtonians? HZ Here,
Lukas is being deceptive, as the allegations concerning the potential of a
Watergate-connected call girl service do not arise on the basis of the phone calls
alone. There was, in fact, evidence that several rings were being operated at the

nearby Colombian Plaza Apartments, adjacent to both the Watergate and to the
motel where McCord’s listening post was located. These rings were overseen “by
at least two madams, Lil Lori and Helen Henderson”; another woman involved

was identified by Hougan as “Tess.”+48 He writes:

Besides their location at the Colombian Plaza Apartments, the prostitutes had at least two
things in common. The first was the homogeneity of their clients. With few exceptions, they
were professional men — lobbyists, lawyers, stockbrokers, physicians, congressional aides, and
real estate developers. They were among the movers and shakers of the capital, and included at
least one US senator, an astronaut, a Saudi prince, a clutch of US and KCIA intelligence agents,
and a host of prominent Democrats.... According to a 1971 police intelligence report... “The

Watergate Hotel ... was a prime source of their business” H2

To make matters more complicated, Lou Russell — linked to McCord and
other figures nebulously circling around the Watergate affair —- was closely
acquainted with the proprietors of the call girl ring. Writes Hougan: “According to
Russell’s friends ... Russell chose to idle away his leisure time in the apartments at
the Colombia Plaza. He was a friend to many of the girls, a sometime customer, a
free-lance bouncer, and a source of referrals”? Russell may, however, have been
playing an even more important role at those apartments. Phillip Bailley, a figure
of incredible importance to the deeper context of the Watergate saga, encountered
Russell there with a set up that included recording equipment, cameras, and two-
way mirrors to record the girls’ clients.

Who was Phillip Bailley, and why was he so important to these unfolding
events? Bailley was a DC lawyer with a predilection for the dark side of life. He
presented himself as a well-connected player, an operative in the capital’s
nighttime world. However, the reality was a bit different — he was, to quote Phil
Stanford, a “fledgling lawyer at the bottom of the D.C. legal food chain’ A
graduate of the local Catholic University of America law school, his self-declared
role model was Bobby Baker — the notoriously crooked political fixer of the
Democratic establishment of the 1950s and 1960s. Baker himself operated within
a constellation of Texas-based businessmen and organized crime figures. It is
possible that, after setting his sights on that type of milieu, Bailley decided to
begin his ascent into these networks. His preferred clientele included “petty
criminals, drug dealers, and prostitutes” +3
In Secret Agenda, Bailley is described as being close to the call girl Jim Hougan

dubbed “Tess,” which was not her real name.” Len Colodny, in Silent Coup,

identifies Bailley’s consort in the call girl ring as Cathy Dieter. To make matters
more confusing, Dieter was not the girl’s real name either. She was actually Erika
“Heidi” Rikan, “a woman who between 1965 and 1966 had performed as a
stripper at Washingtons Blue Mirror Club in the notorious 14th Street
District”! Rikan, like Bailley, was well connected. Her best friend was Maureen
Biner, who at the time was dating John Dean, the Nixon administration’s White
House counsel. Dean and Biner later married, and she changed her name to
Maureen Dean.

Rikan and Biner had known each other for many years at this point. For a brief
period in the late 1960s, Biner was married to George Owen, scout for the Dallas
Cowboys. Owen had the inside track to the top Texas power players; his personal
friends included the oil heir Clint Murchison Jr.; Bedford Wynne, the offspring of
a prominent Dallas family with numerous interests, including oil, real estate,
industry, insurance, and law; Bobby Baker; and Gordon McLendon, a prominent
radio man and occasional intelligence asset. McLendon’ close associates
included, interestingly enough, Jack Ruby, the mobster famous for killing Lee
Harvey Oswald, and David Atlee Phillips, the CIA officer connected to both E.
Howard Hunt and James McCord.1“4 Maureen writes in her autobiography of an
extended trip to Lake Tahoe “with a good and new friend I had met through
George, Heidi Rikan” 28

What’s interesting here is that, through their mutual relationship with George
Owen and the high flyers of Dallas, Texas, Maureen and Rikan were moving into a
circle that overlapped considerably with organized crime interests. McLendon’s
friend Jack Ruby was himself an insider and participant in the Dallas criminal
underworld. The Murchison oil and construction interests, meanwhile, deployed
as lobbyist Irving Davidson, who also was lobbyist for the CIA, the FBI, Israel,

and crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello.22 The Murchisons also maintained

their own ties to Marcello.22 Rikan continued to maintain her ties to this side of

Texas, even after her move to DC. Phil Stanford reports that within her contact
book were Wynne, McLendon, Murchison, and others.+*! The roster of names
helps to further illustrate the convergence of Texas business interests and
organized crime: one of the names, for example, was Fred Black Jr. Black was a
close friend and business partner of the controversial Bobby Baker — and also an
intimate of Moe Dalitz, Johnny Roselli, and Clifford Jones, the mob-linked

132

lieutenant governor of Nevada.“ Jones was also an alleged confidant of Meyer

Lansky, representing his interests in several Vegas casinos. It might be important,
then, that Black - who maintained an apartment in the Watergate — also owned
stakes in several Caribbean casinos owned by Jones.

Another name that appeared in Rikan’s contact book was Ben Barnes, a Texas
real estate major who had served as the state’s lieutenant governor between 1968
and 1973. Among Barnes’ close circle of contacts was Herman Beebe, and the two,
by the 1980s, were linked to a string of collapsed savings and loans — many of
which bore the fingerprints of organized crime and intelligence agencies in their
demise. Yet, even in the 1960s and 1970s, Beebe was making the rounds. The
network of banks and real estate ventures that would lay the groundwork for his
later escapades were tightly interwoven with the criminal enterprises of Carlos
Marcello.83

Just as Rikan maintained her Texas connections after moving to Washington,
she also continued her own personal ties to powerful organized crime figures. At
the time that she was involved with Phillip Bailley and active in the ring operating
across from the Watergate, she was also reportedly the girlfriend of the mob boss
of Washington, DC, Joe Nesline. +34

Born in Washington, DC, in September 1913, Nesline was first arrested in
1931 for “violation of illegal whiskey laws”!3$ Over the years, he raked up an
immense number of encounters with the law — primarily arrests for his persistent
involvement in illicit gambling activities. Nesline’s early gambling operations were
operated from numerous establishments such as the Spartan Club. Many of his
ventures were carried out in partnership with Charles “Charlie the Blade” Tourine.
The pair were arrested on June 13, 1963, in a gambling parlor the two had
organized in Maryland.

One 1962 FBI report identified Tourine as the “collection man” for Nesline.
Nesline and Tourine’s gambling interests intertwined with those of Dino Cellini,
Meyer Lansky’s top casino operator in the Caribbean. Nesline, for example,
maintained a stake in the Colony Club in London, which was operated for a time
by Dino Cellini. Much earlier, in pre-revolutionary Cuba, Nesline had worked
at the Tropicana Club in Havana, where Cellini was acting as manager. At this
time, Tourine was managing the nearby Capri. In the wake of Castros 1959
revolution, Cellini, Tourine, Meyer Lansky’s brother Jake, and Florida mob boss
Santo Trafficante were imprisoned together in a camp called the Trescornia*““ In
addition, in the early 1960s, Nesline and Tourine co-owned a posh Miami beach

house. In 1964, this property was inhabited by Alvin Malnik, a Mafia financier

who was something of a protégé of Lanksy’s.88

Malnik, in this same period, was
plugged into the web of international banking that the organized crime groups
surrounding Lansky used to move the money they reaped from countless real
estate interests, the narcotics trade, and the skim from casinos. He was also the
counsel for the Allied Empire Corporation, a major stockholder in Lansky’s
offshore Bank of World Commerce.

Given these sorts of associations, it is perhaps noteworthy that George Owen
told Len Colodny that he first met Rikan in the mid-1960s in Antigua.482 He was
visiting the island with his good friends Bedford Wynne and Gilbert Lee Beckley.
Beckley, a world-renowned gambler and bookie described by TIME as “a valuable
man to the Cosa Nostra,’ co-owned a hotel on the island called the Miramar,
which is where Owen first crossed paths with Rikan.“2 An FBI report states that
in 1966, Charles Tourine was dispatched to Antigua “to protect Beckley’s
interests.’ The same report states that in addition to Beckley, co-investors in the
Miramar included Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family.

Nesline’s DC operations seem to have been enabled by the extensive
corruption of the local police force. An FBI report from late May 1962 describes
information provided by an informant with intimate knowledge of police
involvement with organized crime in the area. The informant’s name is withheld in
the report — he felt that “his life and that of his family would be placed in jeopardy
if knowledge of his interviews and cooperation with the FBI were even suspected
by the various members of the Washington DC area gambling element.’4++ The
report continues: “No gambler operates in the Washington DC area unless he
obtains protection from the Metropolitan Police Department.’ According to
the anonymous informant, influence over the gambling rackets was divided up
according to the various police precincts, with the “gambling “backers” often
having to deal “directly with the Captain of the particular precinct”!43 But perhaps
some of the most interesting information concerns Roy Blick, the morals squad
head who worked so closely with the CIA: “[Redacted] stated that he was told by
Mitchell and feels certain that it is true that “Snags” Lewis was paying Inspector
Roy Blick and Chief of Police Barnett.... He had been recently advised that
“Snags” Lewis, “Billy” Mitchell, and Joe Nesline are currently doing business with
Blick?4

POTENTIAL MOTIVES

ometime in 1971, Heidi Rikan came to Phillip Bailley with the idea of using

his contacts at the DNC to expand the customer base for the girls at Colombia
Plaza.® The connection between Bailley and the DNC was Spencer Oliver, and
the “thought was someone — perhaps Oliver himself, perhaps another employee —
would be able to steer ‘high-rolling pols’ to [Rikan’s] Colombia Plaza
operation.” According to Bailley, he managed to make contact with someone
within the DNC, and the arrangements were made for a call-out line to be set up
from the offices. The location of this line was purported to be the phone of
Spencer Oliver, though he does not appear to have been the one with whom
Bailley was negotiating. As 1971 gave way to 1972, the operation was bearing
fruit, reportedly with one client or more a day being set up through the DNC
offices. “Other clients,’ writes Len Colodny, drawing on statements made by
Bailley, “included men from the State Department, major hotels in town, a private
club, and the Library of Congress.”**4

Unfortunately for Bailley, trouble was looming on the horizon. On April 6,
1972, the DC police and the FBI raided his home. While Bailley was away, tied up
in court, the authorities were busy pulling a veritable treasure trove of incredibly
incriminating items from his apartment. Among the sex paraphernalia, video-
recording equipment, and other such odds and ends were photographs, home
movies, ledgers, and contact books. Each of these was taken into police custody
and logged as evidence.

The reason for the raid, interestingly enough, was separate from the complex
arrangements running at Watergate and the Colombia Plaza Apartments. Bailley
was being charged with violating the Mann Act, which is better known as the
White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. The crooked lawyer, it seems, was accused of
drugging a university of student, taking pornographic pictures of her and
blackmailing her. As the story goes, Bailley threatened to dispatch copies of the
photographs to her school’s administrators and her parents if she “did not submit
to the attentions of his political cronies and business associates. So, she did
submit, having sex with fifteen consecutive partners at a party hosted by Bailley in
a suburban Maryland house.”48

Phil Stanford, in his book on Rikan, presents a slightly more complicated
story. He identifies the student as Astrid Leflang, who Bailley had attempted to

recruit into Rikan’s call girl ring Rikan, however, rejected Leflang on the

grounds that she was “too low-class” and not sophisticated enough for the
operation she was trying to get up and running. Soon enough, Leflang was feeling
snubbed — and began to provide information to the Capitol Police vice squad.+*°
Thus began Bailley’s legal woes.

Within a month, Assistant US Attorney John Rudy was building a major case
against Bailley. By this time, many women had come forward with accusations
against the attorney, and lists of potential witnesses were being compiled. Because
Bailley’s social networks were so broad, there were quite a few to choose from.
Nevertheless, the media buzz about Bailley’s situation and the seriousness of his
crimes was minimal — at least until June 9, when the Washington Star ran a front-
page story stamped with the headline “Capitol Hill Call Girl Ring Uncovered.’
“The FBI has uncovered,’ the article states, “a high-priced call girl ring allegedly
headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers
from Capitol Hill and involving at least one White House secretary”! The article
seems to be alluding directly to the Rikan call girl ring, while misconstruing just
how involved Bailley was with it.

Who exactly tipped off the Star is unknown, but it set off alarms elsewhere in
DC. Attorney John Rudy received a call from John Dean demanding access to “all
documentary evidence involved in the [Bailley] investigation.”* Rudy and his
assistants were personally summoned to the White House. The evidence,
including Bailley’s contact book, was packed up and brought to Dean. Rudy
would later tell Colodny that the main focus of Dean's attention, besides the
potential sources for the Star’s story, was the black contact book. Many of the
individuals in the book were hidden behind aliases, and two of those were “Cathy
Dieter” and “Clout” Rudy had taken pains to confirm the identities behind the
aliases: Cathy Dieter was Heidi Rikan, while Clout was her good friend and
former roommate Maureen Biner. Rudy, at the time, did not know that Dean was
dating Biner — or, for that matter, that Biner had moved in with Dean.1*3

The timeframe of these events is telling. The raid on Bailley took place on
April 6, 1972, and a day later the CRP provided G. Gordon Liddy with $83,000.
On April 12, McCord received a large chunk of this money to purchase electronic
surveillance equipment. Hougan notes that it was “three days later, on April 15,
that William Haddad wrote to [Jack] Anderson for the first time, informing him

of plans to spy on Democrats.” The first of the break-ins at the DNC then took

place toward the end of May. The Star article and John Dean's encounter with
Bailley’s contact book was June 9..On June 12, Jeb Magruder suggested to Liddy
another break-in — ostensibly for the purposes of acquiring the files of DNC
chairman Larry O’Brien. Magruder, however, had not concocted the scheme out
of whole cloth. It had been Dean’s idea.**> Within five days the police were in the
DNC offices making arrests, and Eugenio Martinez was trying to prevent the
mysterious key from falling into police hands. From there, it was all downhill for
the Nixon administration.

Had Dean ultimately ordered the break-ins to obtain potentially incriminating
information related to the Watergate-Colombia Plaza ring, which was connected
to his future wife via Heidi Rikan? With the specter of organized crime - chiefly,
Rikan’s relationship with Joe Nesline — in play and the rumors swirling about high-
profile Washingtonians indulging in prostitution, it was certainly an explosive
situation. Perhaps Dean was hoping to get out ahead of any revelations that might
emerge from the investigation of Bailley and his impending conviction.

There are also other looming questions. Was there a connection between the
Watergate call girl ring and the sorts of sexual-blackmail operations alleged to have
been carried out by Edwin Wilson? Jim Hougan offers some provocative evidence.
For instance, the “trick book” maintained by Lil’ Lori (Barbara Ralabate)
reportedly contained the names “Ed Wilson” and “Tungsten Park”! The
“Tungsten Park” was clearly Tongsun Park. Furthermore, he writes that the
apartment owned by “Tess” (Heidi Rikan) had been rented in the name of Phillip
Bailley but had actually been paid for “by a wealthy defense contractor, a
sometime lobbyist on Capitol Hill who owned a huge farm and claimed to ‘hail’
from Houston, Texas”! Each of these descriptions match Edwin Wilson, who
had indeed spent time as a lobbyist (covertly working on behalf of the CIA),
owned a sprawling farm in Virginia, and managed lucrative defense contracts via
the TF-157 front companies - one of which, Aroundworld Shipping &
Chartering, operated from Houston, Texas. The implications of this are immense.
If Wilson and Park were indeed connected to the Watergate ring, then it was
plugged into a network that encompassed the activities of Robert Keith Gray, the
George Town Club, the internal politics of Task Force 157, and, ultimately, the
forces seemingly aligning themselves against Richard Nixon.

Seen from this point of view, the Watergate incident, which imploded Nixon's
presidency, appears less like a sloppy robbery gone awry and more like an

elaborate frame-up, followed by a controlled demolition. The specter of the CIA in
Watergate continued even into the trials that followed the unveiling of the break-
ins, as evidenced by the man who was appointed as the Watergate special
prosecutor, Leon Jaworski.

A partner at the Houston-based firm of Fulbright & Jaworski, Jaworski
populated numerous boards and maintained affiliations with a wide gamut of
powerful interests. He held the position of trustee at the M.D. Anderson
Foundation, which had been established in the late 1930s to help build the now-
famous medical center in Houston. Sometime towards the end of the 1950s, M.D.
Anderson became a conduit for funds originating from the CIA. As trustee,
Jaworski was aware of the nature of the funds, and had signed off on it — as had the
foundation’s president, John Freeman, who was a former partner at Jaworski’s
firm. +8

Another Houston-based foundation moving CIA money in this same period
was the San Jacinto Fund.+? Heading the San Jacinto Fund was Ernest Cockrell Jr.
— a board member of the wealthy Bank of the South-west. Jaworski and his law
partners could also be found here: a 1977 Texas Monthly article describes how
“the partners had their closest and most lucrative relationship with the Bank of the
Southwest. In addition to serving as the bank’s legal counsel, members of the firm
dominated the board of directors and occupied the top executive positions” 1$?
Another bank director was the businessman John de Menil, then the
representative of Schlumberger oil interests in America®! Schlumberger would
later be implicated in the covert support for the anti-Castro Cuban exiles,
suggesting yet another CIA element in this network of individuals.1

By the time that the Watergate scandal had erupted, Jaworski could be found
working closely with a veteran of those same anti-Castro operations, and one who
played a prominent role in the events detailed in this chapter: Alexander Haig.
The nature of this relationship was so particular that it saw Haig act as a channel
for the flow of information to Jaworski, including some which had not been
subpoenaed.1® It seems that Haig was playing a direct, if shadowy, role in shaping
the overall thrust of the Watergate prosecution.

THE PAGEBOY SCANDAL

he sordid story rumbling beneath the Watergate fiasco was not the only time that
Robert Keith Gray’s name would come up in connection with sexual-
blackmail rings. As previously mentioned, John DeCamp’s 1992 classic book
on the Franklin scandal raised the specter of Gray — and his connections to
Edwin Wilson — due to his close association with Harold Andersen, the publisher
of the Omaha World Herald newspaper and a close ally of the man at the city of
that particular web, Larry King. Andersen himself stood accused of being a willing
participant in King’s activities.

Nearly a decade earlier, Gray had surfaced in the course of an investigation
into a purported sex-and-drug ring that allegedly operated on Capitol Hill. The
scandal made a momentary splash in the media, but it is now merely a footnote. It
began when Leroy Williams Jr., a congressional page — pages were high school
students employed to fulfill various administrative tasks such as acting as couriers
for congressmen — made startling accusations that he “had sex with three House
members and procured homosexual prostitutes for a senator”/®+ The latter
incident was reported as having taken place at the Watergate office complex.1°=

Initial reports suggested that unnamed witnesses came forward with further
information on sexual activities between politicians and pages, prostitution rings,
and a connected drug ring operating on the Hill. CBS Evening News ran the story
first on July 30, 1982, and the hints of drug abuse were quickly linked to arrests
that had occurred several months earlier. On April 19, Douglas Marshall, Robert
Finkel, and Troy Todd had been nabbed by undercover Washington, DC,
Metropolitan Police for possession of cocaine; of the three, Marshall and Finkel
were charged “with distributing and conspiring to distribute cocaine”®° Todd
and another accomplice, a young woman named Devon Dupres, were
subsequently named as “unindicted co-conspirators.’

Newspapers described Dupres as “a Georgetown cocktail waitress,” though
she appears to have been an assistant to Michael O’Harro, the owner of a DC
discotheque called Tramps.+& Others stated that she

“reportedly socialized with a California congressman now under investigation
by drug agents” and was subsequently entered into the “Justice Department
federal witness program” and “moved to an undisclosed location.”1°2 This odd cast
of characters operated a cocaine ring that employed the services of congressional
pages, tour guides, and other Hill employees who enjoyed wide-ranging access to
members of Congress. Douglas Marshall himself had been a page, while Robert

Finkel had worked as an elevator operator in the Capitol. On July 7, Jack
Anderson reported that “more than 15 members of congress were customers of a
cocaine ring that operated on Capitol Hill, the ringleaders have told narcotics
agents”! He also appeared on ABC News Nightline with Sam Donaldson,
publicly linking the cocaine ring with the emerging allegations of prostitution and
sexual abuse:

Donaldson: All right, Jack, tell us about the page setup. Did you actually catch some pages
involved as couriers?

Mr. Anderson: There were some pages involved, but the drug scam ... changed into a sex scam
later. I know very little about the sex angle of it except that the same people were involved. Some
of the same people.

Donaldson: But pages were acting as couriers for the dealing of drugs?
Mr. Anderson: That’s correct. So were congressional aides 120.

By the time that Anderson was making these accusations, an FBI investigation
and a House Ethics Committee inquiry had formed to assess the possibilities of a
sex-and-drugs ring on Capitol Hill. Oddly enough, old Watergate familiar Joseph
Califano was put in charge of the inquiry. Califano’ team employed a score of
lawyers and investigators, including two private investigators — Richard Powers, a
former New York City police officer, and John “Jack” Moriarty, a former DC
police officer.

Gray’s name came up in the inquiry from an anonymous tip, which was
handled by Powers, who drafted a memo on it to Califano. The memo quickly
disappeared.“ The lead to Gray arose on July 21, when Ethics Committee
counsel Donald Purdy and John Moriarty interviewed yet another figure from the
Watergate days, DC police officer Carl Shoffler. Shoffler turned over the extensive
information that he had compiled on Gray — his links to Edwin Wilson and the
CIA, rumors of his involvement in the use and distribution of narcotics, wild tales
of orgies taking place at his home in Rehoboth Beach.

The most alarming allegation made by Shoffler, however, was that a consultant
for Diamond Shamrock, a major Texas-based oil and gas concern, and a local
photographer personally known to Gray were involved in “a male prostitution
service on Capitol Hill” + Diamond Shamrock was, at the time, a client of Gray
& Co., an independent PR firm set up by Gray in the early 1980s.“ Several weeks
after he provided this information to Purdy and Moriarty, Shoffler was contacted

by a security specialist with longtime intelligence ties, Michael Pilgrim.“ Pilgrim

wanted to know if Shoffler had been hired by H & K - Gray had left the firm to
start Gray & Co. — to keep tabs on their former executive. Pilgrim, in turn, had
been asked to assess Shoffler by Neil Livingstone, yet another strange character
from the murky netherworld where intelligence and Beltway subterfuge
intersected.

Livingstone, who will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter, was at
the time working for Gray at Gray & Co. while also maintaining extensive ties to
the circles around Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, and Edwin Wilson that went
back to the mid-1970s. The arrival of Livingstone on the scene raised even more
puzzling questions. As Susan Trento asked: “How did Livingstone find out that
Shoffler had received allegations about Gray?” +2

The day after his encounter with Pilgrim, Shoffler was contacted by Thomas
Fortuin, Gray's attorney. It was an interesting choice for a lawyer as, in 1981,
Fortuin had taken over from Roy Cohn as the chief attorney for Tony Salerno, the
boss of the Genovese crime family. é These ties may have run deep — Gray was
reportedly a friend of Cohn, though — as previously mentioned, the exact nature
of their relationship remains vague.

A year after the pageboy scandal first broke, Salerno arranged for the
appointment of Jackie Presser as president of the Teamsters Union. Presser was
a client and close associate of Gray; the two may have even owned a mysterious
company together called Member Services Corporation. Fortuin offered
Shoffler the opportunity to interview Gray, with the clarification that Gray would
deny the allegations that Shoffler had made to Purdy and Moriarty. He then added
that it was Moriarty himself who had turned over the information to Gray’s
associates. It was an incredible conflict of interest: in addition to working on the
Ethics Committee probe, both Moriarty and Powers were moonlighting on behalf
of Gray & Co. Powers himself was a longtime associate of Fortuin, who had
employed Powers as his own private investigator. In a subsequent meeting with
Powers, Shoffler himself was offered a job working for Gray — at a very lucrative
salary. Shoffler saw this as an attempted bribe and reported it to the US Attorney.
Very soon a sweeping Department of Justice investigation was underway.

On September 28, 1982, the New York Times ran an article stamped with the
title “Califano suspends 2 investigators in Congress sex and drugs inquiry.”°2
These two investigators were identified as Powers and Moriarty. Califano “did not

return repeated calls to his office, and Justice Department officials declined to
disclose the nature of the charges against Mr. Moriarty and Mr. Powers.”18+

After the Moriarty and Powers debacle, the entire episode came to a close,
much more quietly than it had begun. More questions than satisfactory answers
were raised. In the final Ethics Committee reported, Califano cited evidence that
the US Capitol Police had systematically destroyed documentary records related
to drug trafficking on the Hill - including vital documents put together in the
critical month of July 1982 when the accusations first began to gain momentum.
While the report suggested that disciplinary action in connection with the
destruction might be warranted, there was insufficient evidence “to conclude that
the records ... contained information important to the Committee's investigation
of illicit drug use or distribution of drugs.”

The allegations of sexual abuse of pages and homosexual prostitution were
also soon swept to the side. Leroy Williams, the page who first came forward,
suddenly recanted. He told investigators working on behalf of the Ethics
Committee that he “concocted the tale of sexual misconduct and drug use to draw
public attention to the pressures of the page system”! Importantly, the
congressman with whom he had claimed to have had sex — Larry Craig of Idaho —
was himself a member of the House Ethics Committee®* In 2007, Craig was
arrested after propositioning an undercover police officer for sex in the men’s

restroom of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.+83

Endnotes

—

nu BW N

17
18

22

Susan Trenton, The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Influence and Access in
Washington (St. Martin's, 1992), 11. https://archive.org/details/powerhouserobert0Otren.
Trento, Power House, 17.

Trento, Power House, 17.

Edward J. Epstein, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer (Random House, 1996), 322.
Trento, Power House, 370.

“Knowlton, Donald Snow,’ Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, May 11, 2018,
https://case.edu/ech/articles/k/knowlton-donald-snow; Robert L. Heath, Encyclopedia of
Public Relations (SAGE Publications, 2013), 418; “Tough Problems Were His Hobby,’ Brooklyn
Eagle, April 10th, 1927.

Karen Miller, “Air Power Is Peace Power’ The Aircraft Industry's Campaign for Public and
Political Support, 1943-1949,” Business History Review, Vol. 70, no. 3 (1996): 297-327,
https://doi.org/10.2307/3117240.

Heath, Encyclopedia of Public Relations, 419.

Trento, Power House, 99.

Joseph John Trento, Prelude to Terror : The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private
Intelligence Network (New York : Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. xvi,
http://archive.org/details/preludetoterrorrOOtren.

Trento, Power House, 106.

Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Secret Indochina War

Scott, War Conspiracy, 7.

“Subject: Earl Scheib,’ The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, March 1,
1962, FBI Record 124-10328-10003,

Catherine Forslund. Anna Chennault: Informal Diplomacy and Asian Relations (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002), 101.

Trento, Power House, 98.

Glenn Michael Speer, “Richard Nixon's Position on Communist China, 1949-1960: The
Evolution of a Pacific Strategy,’ CUNY Graduate Center, 1992, 15-16,

J. C. Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijan, Cola Wars: The Story of the Global Battle between the Coca-
Cola Company and PepsiCo, Inc (Everest House, 1980), 115.

Phil McCombs, “Tongsun Park’s Club,’ Washington Post, October 16, 1977,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1977/10/16/tongsun-parks-
club/fc4e8ef5-f79b-4a55-b458-25bb6eeea07a/.

Korean Influence Inquiry: Executive Session Hearings Before the Select Committee on Ethics of
the United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, Second Session, 1978. p. 316.

23

24

25

26

27
28

29

30
31
32

33
34

35
36

37
38
39

40
41
42
43

44
45
46

47

Richard M. Gibson, The Secret Army: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden
Triangle (South Tower Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia), 2011), 58-63.

Peter Dale Scott, “Operation Paper: The United States and Drugs in Thailand and Burma,” no.
2, no. 44 (November 1, 2010), https://apjjf.org/-Peter-Dale-Scott/3436/article.html.

“Life Line Tax Status Queried,” Broadcasting: The Businessweekly of Television and Radio,
September 7, 1964, 72.

David Clayton, Imperialism Revisited: Political and Economic Relations Between Britain and
China, 1950-54 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 25; Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The
Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996), 212.
Maxine Cheshire and Charles Babcock, “Tongsun Park and the Korean CIA,” Washington Post,
August 28, 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/08/28/tongsun-
park-and-the-korean-ciacia-had-reason-to-know-of-parks-ties-to-korean-ciapapers-
interviews-show-scope-of-parks-korean-cia-link/99cdbf98-965e-4c6a-a333-f7c146cfc445/.
Korean Influence Inquiry: Executive Hearings Before the Select Committee on the Ethics of the
United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session, Vol. 1, (US Government Printing
Office, 1978), 152.

Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1988), 364.
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 29: January-December 1971, 1134.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its
Hold on America, 1947-2000, 1st ed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 316.

Scott, Deep Politics, 202-5.

Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, ePub (Sky-horse,
2013), 240.

Scott, War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, 241.

Kim Scipes, AFL-ClO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers (Lexington Books, 2011),
54-60.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 40.

Trento, Power House, 108.

Peter Maas, Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist (Random House
1986), 32.

Trento, Power House, 181.

Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (Random House 1984), 120.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 120.

John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska
(Nebraska: AWT, 1992), 178.

DeCamp, Franklin Cover-Up, 177.

DeCamp, Franklin Cover-Up, 179.

Jean-Guy Allard, “Philip Agee Versus the CIA,” CounterPunch.org, January 21, 2008.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/01/21/philip-agee-versus-the-cia/.

Andrea Conception, “The Mystery of the JM Wave,’ Distraction, February 10, 2018,
https://www.distractionmagazine.com/the-mystery-of-the-jm-wave/; Peter Dale Scott,

“Document: Transnationalised Repression Parafascism and the US,” Wikispooks,

48
49

50

51

52

53
54
55

56
57
58

59

60

61
62
63
64
65
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67

68

69

70
71

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Transnationalised Repression Parafascism and _ th
e US.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 29.

Jim Drinkhall, “CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case,” Washington Post,

quash-major-star-studded-tax-evasion-case/a55ddf06-2a3f-4e04-a687-a3dd87c32b82/.
Listing of Traffic Removed from C/WHD Files Watergate File Research, April 24, 1974,

Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Lawrence Hill
Books, 2003), 212-13.

McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 212-13; Frank Browning and Banning Garrett, “The New Opium
War,’ Wisconsin Historical Society, p. 6,
https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/54609/.

McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 254.

McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 318.

Richard Secord and Jay Wurts, Honored and Betrayed: lrangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret
War in Laos (Wiley, 1992), 20-60.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 41.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 47.

Jeffrey T. Richelson, ed., “The Pentagon's Spies,’ National Security Archive, George
Washington University, May 23, 2001, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB46/.
Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and
Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, chap. 4, https://www.statecraft.org/chapter4.html.

Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Task Force 157: The US Navy's Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77,’
Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 11, no. 1 (January 1996): 109.

Richelson, “Task Force 157,’ 110.

Richelson, “Task Force 157,’ 122-23.

Maas, Manhunt, 48.

Maas, Manhunt, 48; Trento, Prelude to Terror, 52.

Maas, Manhunt, 49.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 71.

Sajit Gandhi, ed., “The Tilt: The US and the South Asian Crisis of 1971,’ National Security
Archive, George Washington University, Dec. 16, 2002,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/.

Gandhi, “Tilt.”

Clark Mollenhoff, “Kissinger Doesn't Get High Mark on Anderson Papers,” Courier-Post
(Camden, New Jersey), January 22, 1972.

Mollenhoff, “Anderson Papers.”

David R. Young, “Memorandum for the President Re: Record of Investigation into Disclosure
of Classified Information in Jack Anderson Articles December 14 and 16, 1971 on
Indian/Pakistan Confrontation,’
http://nixontapes.org/welander/Young_memo_to_Nixon.pdf.

#2

73
74
75
76

77

78

79

80
81

82
83

84

85
86
87

88

89
90
91

92
93
94
95
96
97

98
99

Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of the President (St. Martin’s Press,
1992), 22.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 24.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 30.
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 75.

R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (Linden Pub, 1987), 155-56; Richard Halloran,
“Papers Link Bank to K.C.I.A. Aide in Stock Disposal,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1977.

Richard Halloran, “Inquiry Suggests Korean Agents Tried to Gain Control of Bank in US,” New
York Times, May 31, 1977.

Jonathan Marshall, Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of
American Democracy, Kindle (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), n. 127,
https://rowman.com/WebDocs/Dark Quadrant _Extra_Notes.pdf.

Emma North-Best, “FBI Evidence Points to Journalist Jack Anderson’s Role in Watergate,
MuckRock, Dec. 7, 2017, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/dec/07/jack-
anderson-watergate/.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 79.

Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,
Kindle (Feral House, 2018), 732-55.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 78.

Shane O'Sullivan, Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA. (La Vergne: Hot Books, 2018),
248.

“Memorandum for the Record, Subject: Project Artichoke,” National Security Archive, George
Washington University, Jan. 31, 1975,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/st02.pdf.

“Subject: Project Artichoke.”
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 13.

Rockefeller Commission Report (1975), 249, History Matters Archive, https://history-
matters.com/archive/church/rockcomm/html/Rockefeller_0131a.htm.

Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 106.

Evan Thomas, The Man to See (Simon & Schuster, 2012), 59-60.
Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 106.

William Conrad Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative
Roles and Relationships, Part IV (Princeton University Press, 2014), 857.

O'Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 252.

O'Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 515.

O'Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 251.

O’Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 251.

O'Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 247-48.

Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, Richard Helms As Director of Central Intelligence
(Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1993), 8, https://archive.org/details/Richard-Helms-CIA.

Hathaway and Smith, Richard Helms, 9.
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 202.

100
101

102

103

104

105
106

107
108
109
110
111

112

113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128

129

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 232.

Joseph A. Califano Jr., “Timothy Naftali interview transcription,” Nixon Library documents,
April 3, 2007,

-2007-04-03.pdf.

Joseph A. Califano Jr., “ICCA: Report on status of implementation of actions designed to
counter subversion,” Califano Papers (box 2, folder 26), July 18, 1963.

Gus Russo, Live by the Sword: The Secret War against Castro and the Death of JFK (Bancroft
Press, 1998), 163.

“Cuban Contingency Planning,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Debrief Item Re Cuban Actions, January
23, 1964, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docld=10249.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 264.

“Entry into Democratic National Headquarters,’ JFK Assassination Records, NARA Record
Number: 104-10256-10268 https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?
docld=161720&relPage-Id=9

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 70.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 70.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 70-71.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 71.

Robert Gettlin, “Author Reflects on Watergate and ‘Deep Throat,” Fredericksburg.com, July

watergate-and-deep-throat-robert-co-author-of-silent-coup-1991-
watergate/article_b85944c7-3b85-50c4-a339-c184b9386fal.html.
Jim Hougan, “Hougan, Liddy, the Post and Watergate,” Investigative Notes, June 22, 2011,

Hougan, “Hougan, Liddy, the Post and Watergate.”

Hougan,’Hougan, Liddy, the Post and Watergate.”

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 63.

Anthony J. Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Penguin, 2008), 201.
Lukas, Nightmare, 201.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 115.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 115.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 116.

O’Sullivan, Dirty Tricks, 267.

Phil Stanford, White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story (Feral House, 2013), 69.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 156.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 39.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup.

See Scott, Deep Politics, 232-35.

Maureen Dean and Hays Gorey, “Mo”: A Woman’s View of Watergate (Simon & Schuster, 1975),
40.
Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 283-86.

130
131
132
133
134
135

136
137

138

139

140
141

142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158

159
160
161

162

163

Peter Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.I. Books, 1992), 98-100.
Stanford, White House Call Girl, 158n23.

Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 236-39.

Brewton, Mafia, CIA, and Bush, 23-26.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 164.

“Report on Joseph Francis Nesline,’ FBI Criminal Intelligence Program, Miami, November 15,
1963.

Scott, Deep Politics, 240.

Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations: Findings and Recommendations, US House
of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session, March 29, 1979, 154.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the
Bahamas (Routledge, 1991) 50.

Lindo Minor, “Off the Boards,” Quixotic Joust, March 30, 2011,

Minor, “Off the Boards.”

“Subject: Joseph Shimon,’ FBI, May 29, 1962, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?
docld=116549

“Subject: Joseph Shimon?’

“Subject: Joseph Shimon?’

“Subject: Joseph Shimon?’

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 116-17; Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 130-31.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 130.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 136.
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 112.
Stanford, White House Call Girl, 78.
Stanford, White House Call Girl, 106.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 147.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 148.
Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 149.
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 111.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 152.
Hougan, Secret Agenda, 121.

Hougan, Secret Agenda, 121.

“Leon Jaworski Etex ‘Man of the Month,” Tyler Courier Times, November 27, 1960; “Jaworski
Reportedly Had Role in Setting Up C.I.A. Aid Conduit,’ New York Times, November 6, 1973.

“Texas, Philanthropy, 007, and the Varsity Drag,” Texas Observer, March 3, 1967.
Harry Hurt Ill, “Have Conscience, Will Travel,” Texas Monthly, November 1977, 260.

Sophy Burnham, “The Manhattan Arrangement of Art and Money,’ New York, December 8,
1969, 38.

James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, Kindle (New York:
Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 255-58; Russo, Live by the Sword, 153.

Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, 386-396.

164

165

166

167
168

169
170
171
172
173

174
175
176
177

178
179
180

181
182
183

184
185

Andy Davis, “NLR Teen’s Allegations Surface in Light of Craig Arrest,’ Arkansas Democrat
Gazette, August 31, 2007, https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2007/aug/31/nlr-teens-
allegations-surface-light-craig-20070831/.

Robert Pear, “Authorities Meet on Capitol Sex and Drug Inquiry,’ New York Times, July 8,

inquiry.html.

“Report on the Investigation Pursuant to House Resolution 12 Concerning Alleged Illicit
Uses or Distribution of Drugs By Members, Officers, or Employees of the House,’ House of
Representatives, 98th Congress, 1st Session, Report no. 98-559, Nov. 17, 1983,
https://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/Hrpt98-559%20pt.%201.pdf.

Robert Gearty and Joseph Volz, “Pol Snorts at Coke Use Rap,’ Daily News, Jan. 22, 1983

Robert Gearty and Joseph Volz, “Probe Senator in Coke Case,” Daily News, Jan. 15, 1983;
Gearty and Volz, “Pol Snorts at Coke Use Rap”

“Report on the Investigation Pursuant to House Resolution 12,” 18.
“Report on the Investigation Pursuant to House Resolution 12,” 8.
Trento, Power House, 176.

Trento, Power House, 177.

Sari Horwitz, “Gray & Co.” Washington Post, Sept. 6, 1984,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/09/06/gray-38/7cf190f1-e247-
4e06-803b-6c6dcdc6c35a/.

Trento, Power House, 177.

Trento, Power House, 177.

Daily Labor Reports, vols. 21-40<correct?>, Bureau of National Affairs, 1981, 5.

Arnold H. Lubasch, “Mob Figures Chose Teamsters’ Chief, Government Says,’ Nov. 25, 1986,

government-says.html.
Trento, Power House, 203.
Trento, Power House, 177-79.

Leslie Maitland, “Califano Suspends 2 Investigators in Congress Sex and Drugs Inquiry,’ New
York Times, Sept. 26, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/26/us/califano-suspends-2-

Maitland, “Califano Suspends 2 Investigators.”
“Report on the Investigation Pursuant to House Resolution 12,” 161.
“Leroy Williams, the former page whose tales of sex ...,’ UPI, Aug. 27, 1982,

of-sex/8930399268800/.
Davis, “NLR Teen’s Allegations Surface.”

New York Times, “Senator, Arrested at Airport, Pleads Guilty,” New York Times, August 28,
2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/washington/28craig,html.

CHAPTER 6

A PRIVATE CIA

CHANGING TIMES

Des the Watergate affair, Henry Kissinger appeared as something of an

outsider, even though he had entered the administration as a favored
intellectual scion of the Rockefeller-dominated “Eastern Establishment.” His
positions on the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union, arms reduction, and
opening to China put him out of step with the robust, semi-covert network of
spooks, lobbyists, power brokers, and businessmen who were oriented toward the
Nationalist Chinese, toward rolling back the Soviets through military means, and
increasing defense budgets. Until the Watergate scandal, the lines seemed starkly
drawn. But, as time wore on, the battles between liberal reformers and hardliners
reached a fever pitch, and certain lines seemed to bend and blur.

Kissinger, in particular, appeared to have undergone something of a
geopolitical reorientation, retooling his commitments to reflect the new power
bloc. In the latter part of the 1970s, he took up a post at the Center for the Institute
of International Studies. As Jerry Sanders has noted, the Center and its partner
organization, the American Enterprise Institute, “set themselves up in competition
with such august bodies as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral
Commission” The Center’s director was Ray Cline, an old China Lobby hand,
OSS veteran (having served in the China theater alongside notables such as Paul
Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, and John K. Singlaub), and a high-ranking CIA officer.
Cline had been a consistent critic of the Nixon-Kissinger policies of detente and
opening to China.

To acclimate properly to his new affiliations and associates, Kissinger adopted a
harsh line on the ongoing arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. It was
indicative, he said, of a “defeatist consensus” accepted by the “traditional
establishment.” By this point, a robust network of New Right activist groups,

think-tanks, advocacy groups, and their conservative backers had formed to push
back against detente policies and arms reduction, calling instead for an increase in
military spending and more hawkish orientation toward the Soviets. Many of these
were organized from classic centers of power like the American Security Council,
an entity described as the “heart and soul of the military-industrial complex,” the
Committee on the Present Danger, the Heritage Foundation (where Robert Keith
Gray maintained a post), and the AFL-CIO.

New groups such the Conservative Caucus, the Coalition for Peace through
Strength, and the Free Congress Foundation also dotted the landscape, drawing on
money unleashed by philanthropies such as the Scaife, Olin, and Koch
foundations. Other active players in this world included Reverend Moon's
Unification Church, which was tied very closely to the China Lobby and to the
KCIA. Two of the Unification Church’s top US allies were Ray Cline and
Alexander Haig. Managing a sizable portion of the Unification Church's
promotional campaigns and serving in a secretarial role in many of its front groups
was the political direct-mail mastermind Richard Viguerie. A member of the
George Town Club, Viguerie was associated with numerous groups during this
period, carrying out work on behalf of the Conservative Caucus and the various
anti-disarmament campaigns launched by organizations such as the Committee on
the Present Danger and its allies. All of these activities were run from Viguerie’s
headquarters, a building he owned at 7777 Leesburg Pike in Falls Church, Virginia.
It was a location that came to play a fundamental role in the world of Ted Shackley,
Edwin Wilson, and Thomas Clines.

Reformist efforts, nevertheless, continued to build. One such reformer was
Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had risen through the ranks to become director of
Naval Intelligence in 1974. He followed this with stints as head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and then, briefly, as deputy
director of the CIA under William Casey. Inman privileged signal intelligence —
intelligence acquired via electronic means as opposed to human intelligence
gathering methods — and had a strong distaste for what he perceived as waste,
inefficiency, and redundancy within the intelligence community. He was also seen
as a something of a moderate, a counterpoint to those fixated on covert operations
and assassination programs such as those favored by Shackley and his clique.

In 1976, Task Force 157 was on the chopping block. For Inman, “it was an
expensive unit of dubious benefit to the Navy”* There were also the rumors and
hints that TF-157, via Wilson, had become embroiled in covert operations quite

different from its stated mandate. In 1975, for example, Wilson entered into a series
of curious business arrangements with Bernie Houghton of Nugan Hand, a bank
headquartered in Australia whose management consisted predominately of
supposed former US intelligence officials.

Houghton himself was no stranger to the circle of individuals around Wilson,
having worked in Vietnam in close proximity to the primary operators in
Shackley’s secret wars. At the time that Houghton was meeting up with Wilson,
the Nugan Hand Bank appears to have been involved in brokering the sale of arms
to paramilitaries in South Africa. The financing of the arms was arranged through a
web of banks such as Nugan Hand’s Hong Kong subsidiary. Yet, when it came to
purchasing and shipping the arms, Houghton and his partner, Michael Hand,
turned to Edwin Wilson. According to an official Australian government report on
the criminal activities of the Nugan Hand Bank:

There was a number of meetings between Wilson, Houghton, and the others over a relatively
short period of time. Subsequently, under the cover of Task Force 157, Wilson placed an order for
something like “10 million rounds of ammunition, 3,000 weapons including machine guns, M-1
carbines, and others.” The shipment is believed to have left the US from Boston. The End Users’
certificate indicated that [Wilsons TF-157 front company] World Marine was the US purchasing
agent while the middle company or buyer’s agent was an Australian company but not Nugan
Hand. The name given as the buyer was Portuguese, and was a name that had been used

previously and possibly after by World Marine in other unrelated covert operations.®

Rumors also abounded that TF-157 and Nugan Hand were complicit in the
destabilization of the Australian government of Gough Whitlam, which was
considering closing the CIA’ satellite monitoring station called Pine Gap. Alarms
about Whitlam’s intentions were raised in the halls of the CIA by none other than
Shackley; according to Victor Marchetti, a high-ranking CIA officer, Whitlam
“caused apoplexy in the White House ... a kind of Chile [coup] was set in
motion”? Likely with these and other incidents in mind, Inman determined that
TF-157 was “out of control”! Wilson attempted to negotiate with the naval
intelligence chief, suggesting that if TF-157 were shut down, perhaps another,
more effective organization should be set up (with Wilson getting the lucrative
contracts to run it, of course). Shackley also attempted to intercede, suggesting to
Inman that shuttering the program and firing Wilson would be the “loss of a major
intelligence asset. Inman told Shackley that if he found Wilson so valuable, he
could put him back on the CIA payroll.”4

TF-157 was ultimately shut down, and Wilson was, by all appearances at least,
out of the job. At that same moment, events were taking place that would
ultimately lead to Wilson’s downfall. In December 1975, shortly before Inman's
decision to dismantle TF-157 began, Wilson met a former CIA operative named
Frank Terpil. Terpil ran a company called Intercontinental Technology, a
subsidiary of Stanford Technology - a firm that would feature prominently in the
Iran-Contra affair.“ Stanford’s owner was Albert Hakim, an Iranian businessman
who acted as a back channel between Iran and Israel.

By the time he met Terpil, Wilson was already familiar with Hakim, as they had
been introduced by Richard Secord. Terpil proposed to Wilson a business venture
that involved scouring weapons and other sensitive technologies for the
government of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Terpil had been trading with Libya
through a partnership with a Pennsylvania businessman named James McElroy.
McElroy, according to Peter Maas, “had been one of the first entrepreneurs to cash
in on money-flush OPEC oil nations in Africa and the Middle East. McElroy began
supplying them with everything from Pampers to pistols. Gradually Libya became
one of his big customers, and from Pampers, it was more and more pistols?” 14 But
what the Libyans hoped to score, from Terpil and Wilson, was heavier equipment:
“C-4 plastic explosives and a Red-Eye Missile” +$

With the approval of Shackley and Clines, Wilson went to work in Libya. The
operation quickly expanded into a training program for Libyan fighters. To carry
this out, Wilson and Terpil set up a cover company called Inter-Technology and
several other export firms. Former CIA officers like Kevin Mulcahy were brought
in to run them, while the secret training school was staffed by former Green
Berets.1° Among the trainers was Eugene Tafoya, “a beefy, acne-scarred thug,
widely disliked by his comrades, who after a few glasses of ‘flash, the Libyan
equivalent of bathtub gin, would boast about all the people hed blown away
behind enemy lines in Vietnam”? Soon enough Tafoya was working as a hitman
for Wilson and was outsourced to the Libyan government for an ultimately ill-fated
assassination plot against political dissidents living abroad.*® All the while Wilson
reported information back to Shackley and Clines and, reportedly, to the SAVAK -
the Iranian intelligence apparatus under the Shah — as well.

At this point, Shackley’s star was continuing to rise within the CIA. In January
1976, George H.W.Bush was made President Gerald Ford’s director of the CIA,
and Shackley was made assistant deputy director for Operations. His coveted

position was director of central intelligence, and he fully expected to serve as Bush's
successor: “Shackley had been tapped to become CIA director if Gerald Ford had
been re-elected president”? This, however, never came to pass. Ford didn’t win the
election and was instead succeeded by President Jimmy Carter. Bush was ousted
from his position as director of central intelligence and replaced by a reformist,
Admiral Stansfield Turner.

Turner came from outside the world of the CIA. A career military officer, he
was a former schoolmate of Carter’s and was selected to reorganize the CIA. Large
swaths of the Agency dedicated to undercover operations and special warfare were
systematically removed, fundamentally changing the character and culture of the
CIA. Shackley held on for a while, compartmentalizing what remained in the
directorate of Operations and hiding it from the watchful eyes of Carter and
Turner.

In 1979, Shackley retired from the CIA to dedicate himself to a series of private
business ventures. In reality, these ventures were components of a private
intelligence network that he had been designing over the course of several years.
The long-term plan was to use this private CIA as the foundation for a rollback of
Carter’s reforms, when a Republican president would inevitably succeed him. This
private network, unsurprisingly, quickly found itself embroiled in a series of
international scandals.

Much of Shackley’s network was bankrolled with money provided by Wilson.
According to FBI memoranda, published as part of a later report by the
Congressional Committee Investing the Iran-Contra affair, Wilson provided Clines
with a loan to organize a company called International Research and Trade (IRT),
which acted as a corporate umbrella for two other Clines-owned companies. These
were System Services International (SSI) and API Distributors.

SSI, registered in Bermuda, was later described by Shackley as “designed
originally to be a trading company [for] securities.” According to his testimony
during the Iran-Contra hearings, SSI did very little business.” This was soon
revealed to be untrue. API Distributors, registered as a Delaware corporation, was
organized to act as a supplier for oil companies. One of its primary clients was
Pemex, the Mexican state-owned petroleum firm. It set up shop in Houston, Texas,
where it shared offices with Wilson’s Aroundworld Shipping. API had a tendency
to bring into the fold old veterans of the Agency’s secret wars. Rafael Quintero and
Ricardo Chavez, both old recruits who operated under the auspices of JM/WAVE,

were put on the API payroll and dispatched to Mexico, ostensibly to work on the
Pemex project.

When questioned about his role in these companies, Shackley offered only
vague responses. For SSI, he did some sort of unspecified work, while for API he
“worked as a consultant, employee, office manager, trying to get the company off
the ground.”* He told the FBI that he had not played any role whatsoever in IRT,
stating that he only had passing knowledge of this Clines-owned parent company.
Despite Shackley’s efforts to distance himself, numerous figures associated with the
private CIA — people like Clines, Wilson, and Richard Secord — “told the FBI and
other government agencies that it was quite clear that Shackley was the boss”?

Further evidence comes from the curious office arrangement of Research
Associates International, the “consultancy and risk analysis” firm Shackley
launched in 1979. Just as API Distributors shared office space with Wilson’s
Aroundworld Shipping, Research Associates International shared offices with SSI
and International Research and Trade. RAI’s staff included multiple Shackley
associates from his CIA days. Directors of the firm included Jim Critchfield,
Donald Jameson, and a mysterious “Mr. Ledbetter,’ who may have actually been
Calvin Hicks. If so, Hicks would have known Shackley from his JM/WAVE days.”°

Research Associates International was formed with a specific focus on the oil
industry, and it appears to have only had one, exclusive, client: John Deuss
(deceptively spelled as “Dois” in the transcripts of Shackley’s Iran-Contra
testimony). Deuss, through an expansive corporate web organized around
Transworld Oil, moved in the murky world of oil trading where he worked with the
likes of the infamous commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich. Between
1979, when he first hired Shackley’s Research Associates International, and 1993,
Deuss dominated South Africa’s oil imports, with Transworld Oil accounting “for
more than half of South Africas oil purchases.’24 Aside from Deuss, the other
giants of this trade — which was essential for the maintenance of the apartheid
regime — were Marc Rich and Marimpex, a German oil-trading company. As will be
noted later in Chapter 16, a former “girlfriend” of Epstein’s, Francis Jardine, later
married John Deuss. Jardine accompanied Epstein to the Clinton White House in
September 1994.

Shackley and Deuss intersected through Shackley’s massive web of contacts.
The introduction between the two was made by Michael Corrie, then serving as
president of Transworld Oil. Corrie had run Royal Dutch Shell’s Vietnam division,

which was one of the major firms tapped by the US military to assist the war effort
(though, ironically, a robust black market saw significant amounts of Shell
petroleum routed to the Viet Cong). It was there that Corrie and Shackley became
acquainted.78

There was also the interesting selection of attorneys by Shackley and Clines:
the legal legwork for setting up Research Associates International, System Services
International, and International Research and Trade was the prestigious
Washington-based firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge. Terry Reed and
John Cummings, in Compromised, wrote that the firm was “very much aligned with
the CIA” and had “a history of providing criminal defense for intelligence agents.”>2
One former CIA officer on the Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge payroll at this
time was William Barr, the future Attorney General for Presidents George H.W.
Bush and, years later, Donald Trump. Barr had worked for the CIA from 1973 to
1977. He joined Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge in 1978, but it is unknown if
he worked on any of the accounts linked to this private CIA during his time there.

One lawyer at the firm who was known to represent these interests was Barbara
Rossotti, who worked as Clines’ attorney. Rossotti’s name appears in FBI files in
connection with what might have been the crown jewel of this entire complex, the
Egyptian-American Air Transport and Services Corporation (EATSCO).*+
EATSCO was owned by two corporate entities: 51 percent was held by Tersam, a
Virginia company opened by an Egyptian intelligence officer turned businessman,
Hussein K. Salem, and 49 percent was held by Clines’ SSI. Clines and Salem
parked the headquarters of EATSCO at a familiar location: 7777 Leesburg Pike,
the same building that was a hub for the emergent New Right networks of Richard
Viguerie and his associates. To make these ties more compact, Salem was,
throughout this period, living in the Ramada Inn located next to the 7777
Leesburg Pike.

According to Clines, the hotel’s bar was a CIA “watering spot”? EATSCO
functioned as a middleman in arms sales made by the Pentagon to Egypt following
the arrangement agreed upon during the Camp David Accords. It inserted itself
between the respective militaries and the freight forwarders that were selected to
move the cargo. From the get-go, it was clear that this was hardly a normal
arrangement. Most Pentagon-related arms sales did not involve “any commercial
concern like EATSCO,’ which makes it somewhat unsurprising that EATSCO

became implicated in a scheme to overcharge the Pentagon for the costs of the
shipments.

One of EATSCO’s men inside the Pentagon - who signed off on the immense
prices being demanded by the company — was Richard Secord, the future Iran-
Contra co-conspirator. When Wilson's prosecutor, Lawrence Barcella, was put on
the trail of EATSCO in the early 1980s, he was paid a visit by yet another future
Iran-Contra conspirator — and close friend of Shackley and Clines - Michael
Ledeen. According to the New York Times, Ledeen suggested to the attorney that
“any alleged billing abuses might have gone for a covert operation”? EATSCO, in
other words, might have been skimming Pentagon money and redirecting it to
finance the activities of the private CIA.

Indeed, rumors have abounded that EATSCO was covertly running arms to
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to CIA-backed fighters in other Cold War hot
spots. The fingerprints of Edwin Wilson seemed to be all over EATSCO.
Journalists linked a series of major loans to SSI made by Wilson to EATSCO, while
handwritten notes made by Eugene Tafoya — the former marine employed by
Wilson for wetworks operations — made reference to the company. A security-
equipment supplier used by EATSCO called Systems Engineering International
Corporation was owned and managed by Donald Lower, the former manager of
Wilson's sprawling Virginia farm. Incredibly, Systems Engineering International —
like all of the other companies in this complex - drew on the legal resources of
Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge and operated from an office located adjacent to
EATSCO at 7777 Leesburg Pike“

ODD CONNECTIONS

By the mid-1970s, Edwin Wilson had gained control of Joseph J. Cappucci
Associates, an “international firm specializing in the protection of heads of
state”38 The company had been formed by US Air Force Col. Joseph J. Cappucci.
He had been no stranger to the world of intelligence: during World War II, he had
served as a counterintelligence officer for the Army Air Corps and, after the war, he
became a liaison between the new intelligence apparatus of the Air Force and the
CIA. He later served as the chief of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
How Wilson gained control of Cappucci’s company is not clear, nor is there a
firm trail of records illustrating the relationship between the two men. What is

clear, however, is that it was eventually folded into the byzantine web of the private
CIA: Wilson sold his interests in Cappucci to the trio of Thomas Clines, Donald
Lowers, and Neil Livingstone (mentioned in the last chapter in connection with
Robert Keith Gray and the congressional page boy scandal). The money used to
purchase Wilson's shares reportedly came from “US government expropriation
funds collected after an airline Livingstone and a partner had purchased was taken
over by the Panamanian government”? The airline in question was Air Panama.*2

Livingstone himself had spent time in Panama between 1976 and 1979, and
there he had been associated with the notorious Mossad operative Michael
Harari.*! Harari’s long and twisting career began with a stint in the Haganah, where
he acted as a courier at just thirteen years old, later graduating from their elite
fighting corps, the Palmach. After the formation of Israel, he joined the Israel
Defense Force and was eventually recruited by Mossad. During the early 1970s,
Harari led teams across Europe to hunt and target members of Black September,
the Palestinian group responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre. Harari’s team
had a tendency to leave a trail of dead bystanders and civilians in their wake.
Despite this, he was eventually dispatched to serve as head of Mossad’s Latin
American operations.

Over time, Panama became the primary site of Harari’s activities. Livingstone,
in an article on the spymaster for the Washington Post, wrote that “Panama City had
become an intelligence center ... a sort of Latin American version of Beirut or
Vienna.’ Harari became particularly close to Manuel Noriega, then serving as
head of the country’s intelligence service. Noriega maintained a convoluted
intelligence web, simultaneously serving on the payrolls of the CIA and the Cuban
intelligence directorate, the Dirección General de Inteligencia. “Noriega’s
relationship with the DGI,” writes Livingstone, “became a valuable pipeline of
information on PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) activities for Harari and
his superiors back in Israel.”42

By the early 1980s, Harari had been detached from the Mossad - at least in an
official capacity — and was making a living as an arms dealer and security specialist
for Noriega. José Blandén Castillo, a top Noriega advisor who testified to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Sub-committee on Terrorism, Narcotics,
and International Operations (also known as the Kerry Committee), accused
Harari of running a “network” that managed a guns-and-drugs pipeline across Latin

America.** It was this same logistical network that laid the groundwork for the
later Contra-support efforts.

Harari, importantly, was in close contact with Duane Clarridge - the CIA
officer who oversaw those initial efforts. Livingstone’s tenure at Cappucci was
among the first of his post-Panama activities. A contract was signed with the
Egyptian government of Anwar Sadat to train the presidential security forces. CIA-
trained Cuban exile Felix Rodriguez, who had worked under Shackley at both
JM/WAVE and in Vietnam, was brought in to oversee the operation. It was part of
the arrangements being organized by Wilson and Clines that had produced the
EATSCO deal. Both would later tell journalist Morgan Strong that deals such as
these were being made through a kickback arrangement in which large sums of
money were to be passed to Sadat via Hosni Mubarak in exchange for the
contracts.*®

EATSCO’s primary support apparatus in these various deals was Global
International Airways, a Kansas City-based charter airline and cargo carrier
founded in the late 1970s by Farhad Azima. An Iranian-born businessman, Azima
had launched the company with the ostensible purpose of transporting “cattle from
Nebraska to Iran, until the US cut diplomatic ties after the 1979 Islamic
Revolution” It was likely that much more than cattle were being ferried on these
flights, considering that Azima was reportedly tied to the shah’s SAVAK.*2 Azima
launched Global International Airways with the aid of a “multi-million dollar loan
from the Commercial Credit Corporation.’*8 In the beginning, its fleet consisted of
one Boeing 707.* It quickly grew to be “one of the largest private air carriers in the
world, with seventeen 707s, two 727s, and one 747722

Joseph Trento suggests that Azima was a front man for the private CIA, with
Global International having actually been designed by James Cunningham, who
had worked under Shackley in Laos as the manager of the CIA’s Air America.>
While this particular claim cannot be substantiated, there are hints that this
network was present at Global International’s inception. For example, at least one
of Azima’s pilots had previously worked for Air America. Even more suggestive of a
connection is the source of Azima’s loan — the Commercial Credit Corporation.
This was the commercial finance-and-lending subsidiary of the Control Data
Corporation (CDC), a supercomputer firm that had operated as a high-profile
defense contractor since its inception at the end of World War II. CDC would later

make an appearance on the periphery of the PROMIS scandal, also known as the
Inslaw affair (the subject of chapter 9).

Around 1976 — shortly before Commercial Credit provided Azima with the
start-up capital for Global International Airways — Control Data Corporation hired
Edwin Wilson as a consultant with the hopes of leveraging the spook’s contacts “to
unload some outdated computers on Third World countries”$2 The arrangement
between the two, however, seems to have been much greater than simple export
affairs. Wilson was subsequently accused of having bugged the offices of the US
Army Materiel Command in order to obtain “inside information ... on bidding
and procurement plans” on behalf of the corporation.

Before Global International Airways went bust in the mid-1980s, Azima ran up
huge debts with several financial institutions - most notably Indian Springs State
Bank in Kansas, which underwent its own collapse in tandem with Global
International. Azima had been brought on as a director for the institution, while its
vice president, Anthony Russo, acted as a “financial consultant” for Global
International.“ Russo had previously been a high-profile Kansas City criminal
attorney, notorious for representing members of the Civella crime family. In the
investigation that followed the bank’s insolvency, it was revealed that Russo had
brought Civella interests into the fray. Their accounts at the bank, one state banking
examiner found, were “habitually overdrawn” Indian Springs also provided
massive loans to the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Vegas, which was at the time
under the control of Morris Shenker. Shenker had previously been Jimmy Hoffa's
attorney and was no stranger to suspect financial wranglings, as he had been
intimately involved with the corruption plaguing the Teamsters pension fund. He
personally guaranteed the loan from Indian Springs to the Dunes, while Azima had
sponsored it. Global International was at the heart of these business transactions as
the airline “had a contract with some Las Vegas hotel-casinos to fly junkets.”=°

Clearly, this emergent network was like an octopus, with far-reaching tentacles
reaching out in all directions and intertwined with seemingly legitimate businesses.
The ghostly traces of this network's presence could be found in all types of
corruption. One strange nexus, touched on briefly by journalist Pete Brewton, was
the complex of companies set up in Louisiana by Charles F. Haynes and Vaughn R.
“Bobby” Ross.>4 Ross was a pilot with a military service record, and Haynes was a
“timber man.” In 1979, they formed Commercial Helicopters, which amassed a
fleet of over thirty aircraft in just three years. The primary business of Commercial

Helicopters was providing transportation to and from the numerous oil rigs that
dotted the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, there is also evidence that the company had a
strange, darker underbelly. Haynes and Ross, for example, leased helicopters from
Flying Tiger Line, the company that was linked so closely to the China Lobby and
to Anna Chennault and Robert Keith Gray. There were also connections to the
network of ex-CIA operatives. Brewton notes that Commercial Helicopters
“provided parts and services to a helicopter company in Guatemala” called
Helicopteros de Guatemala.*8

Helicopteros was managed by Carl Jenkins, a veteran of the CIA’s anti-Castro
operations. Operating from outposts in Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean,
Jenkins had been the case officer for a number of important Cuban exiles,
including Rafael Quintero and Manuel Artime — both of whom had reappeared in
the circles that surrounded Shackley, Clines, and Wilson.22 Ted Shackley stated,
during his questioning as part of the Congressional Iran-Contra inquiry, that he
knew Jenkins and had last encountered him in the offices of Thomas Clines, which
Jenkins was also using.°° Given the location and the time frame, this was likely API
Distributor’s Houston offices, which, as mentioned earlier, were operating from the
same offices of Wilson's freight forwarder. Gene Wheaton, a close associate of
Jenkins - and one of the early Iran-Contra whistleblowers — told Brewton that he
had crossed paths with Ross, having been introduced by the “crowd around Ed
Wilson’! The 2018 obituary of Ross states that he served a tour in Vietnam from
1969 to 1970, where he was a pilot in the 57th Assault Helicopter Company.
During this same year, the 57th was tasked with providing “support to the Military
Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group in their mission to
send reconnaissance teams into Laos and Cambodia to locate and interdict North
Vietnamese Army (NVA) infiltration routes and their sources of supply?& Ross, in
other words, was in direct proximity to the secret war in Laos, the CIA wing of
which was being run by Shackley and his cronies.

Wheaton’s claim about the business affairs of Ross and Haynes included the
allegation that Commercial Helicopters had, in fact, purchased API Distributors.
Ross denied to Pete Brewton that this was true — but, oddly enough, Haynes
formed a company called API Oil Tools & Supply. While this company, like
Commercial Helicopters, was registered in Louisiana, the bulk of its business —
leasing “power tongs, an oil drilling tool” — was located in Houston, Texas.°4
Crucial financing for Commercial Helicopters and API Oil Tools & Supply came

from Herman Beebe, the financial brain behind a network of banks and savings and
loans that sprawled Louisiana, Texas, and other surrounding states. Beebe — who
was later implicated in the massive collapse of numerous savings and loans in the
1980s — had long-standing ties to the criminal underworld, some of which went
right to the top of the major American Mafia families.

According to Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Beebe “had been
arrested in a New York restaurant with East Coast Mafia boss Carlo Gambino and
Florida boss Santo Trafficante” in 1966.°° He was further linked, by a number of
law enforcement sources, to Trafficante’s close partner Carlos Marcello, the don of
the New Orleans Mafia whose empire extended well into Texas. In 1972, US
Customs agents and police raided a Shreveport, Louisiana, warehouse owned by
Beebe; inside, explosives and rigging devices that were destined for anti-Castro
Cuban groups were found.© Though Beebe never faced charges in relation to the
incident, numerous conspirators were arrested, among them a close associate of the
Gambino family, Murray Kessler. Another was the pilot who had been hired to
ferry the explosives — none other than Barry Seal, the infamous drug pilot who
operated on the CIA payroll and who would later be implicated in running
Colombian cocaine in conjunction with covert Contra-support operations. “Bobby
Ross,” wrote Brewton, “was a longtime close friend of Barry Seal. “We grew up
together, Ross said.”™ This raises the possibility that Seal was connected, at a very
early stage, to Shackley’s network.

BUSH’S WEB

ournalist Pete Brewton, in his study of the savings and loan crisis, reported on

the possibility that another — though perhaps related - private-intelligence
network was also being formed during this period. The architect of this network
was George H.W.Bush. Reportedly, Bush had expressed to Jimmy Carter his
willingness to stay on as head of the CIA, only to be rebuffed. Bush subsequently
returned to Texas and started anew, alongside his close associates and various
business partners.

According to one of Brewton’s sources, Bushs main ally was William
Blakemore II, an oilman-rancher hailing from Midland, Texas. Buried deep in the
voluminous materials compiled as part of official inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair
is Blakemore’s name: he served as president of the Gulf and Caribbean Foundation,

a “philanthropic” body used to move funds raised by private donors to the
Nicaraguan Contras.

Another source gave Brewton a different set of names: Walter Mischer, a
Houston real estate mogul and banker (and friend of Blakemore), and his son-in-
law Robert Corson.“ In 1991, Corson was found dead in an El Paso motel after
being indicted for money laundering and fraud. Those charges connected Corson
to a succession of bizarre financial dealings that involved a string of saving and
loans, as well as large mainstream banking institutions. Among the sources that
Brewton cites is Richard Brenneke, an infamous CIA-adjacent arms dealer and
money launderer who became a whistleblower for both the October Surprise and
the Iran-Contra affair. “According to Brenneke,” Brewton writes, “Corson worked
with him in laundering money for the CIA.” Interestingly, Brenneke’s money-
laundering activities were, according to Gordon Thomas, of immense interest to
Israeli intelligence, which allegedly studied his methods with the aid of the
PROMIS software. PROMIS, and Robert Maxwell’s intimate involvement in that
operation on behalf of Israeli intelligence, is discussed in greater detail in chapter
9.2

Brewton, meanwhile, further suggests the possibility of Corson’s involvement
with Israeli intelligence: “A Texas law enforcement official who has worked with
intelligence agencies confirmed Corson’s work for the CIA. This officer said that
Corson also did work for the Israelis but may not have known it, because there
were several layers of cut-outs between Corson and the Israelis?”

Given this possible connection not only to American but Israeli intelligence,
there is perhaps significance to the fact that there were direct ties between Walter
Mischer and Texas Senator John Tower — the George Town Club member whose
activities in the late 1980s were intimately intertwined with those of Robert
Maxwell. As will be detailed in chapter 9, Maxwell, an Israeli intelligence asset
since the early 1960s, had helped place Tower himself on the payroll of Israel
intelligence in the 1980s.

Mischer’s ties to Tower came through Mischer’s position as something of a
political kingmaker. Mischer, according to press reports, had a “virtually unrivaled
ability to raise cash for politicians,’ and he lent his talents to both Democrats and
Republicans. While he could often be found backing Democrats like Lloyd

Bentsen, he had also “long been a backer of Republican John Tower.”2®

Mischer’s rise to the heights of Texan political power came through extensive
holdings in construction, manufacturing, real estate and banking. According to his
obituary, Mischer, during World War II, had worked as a project manager at Stone
& Webster, a major East Coast engineering concern that had become a major
defense contractor that, among other things, designed and built the laboratories
utilized for the Manhattan Project. During this time, he worked with the company
to construct “naval bases in the Caribbean.”

After the war, he became entangled with a web of development companies, the
most important of which was the Mischer Corporation, which he owned until his
death. The Mischer Corporation “own[ed] thousands of acres of prime
development land in the Houston area, while affiliated companies do street paving
and sell air-conditioning units to home builders.’Another Mischer company,
organized in partnership with his close friend and colleague Howard L. Terry, was
Marathon Manufacturing, which produced heavy industrial equipment. Marathon
specialized in oil equipment and offshore drilling platforms, having acquired one of
the leading companies in this field, R.G. LeTourneau Inc., in 1970. LeTourneau’s
first offshore oil platform had been built for Zapata Petroleum, the CIA-linked oil
company founded by G.H.W. Bush.”

In 1979, Marathon was purchased by Penn Central, a company that, along with
its then-owner, Carl Lindner, will be discussed at length in chapter 10. As a result,
Mischer and Terry ended up with a significant chunk of Penn stock.®2 In 1986, the
pair sold their Penn stock to the tune of $106 million. The most important node of
the Mischer complex was Allied Bancshares, a sprawling holding company that
Mischer controlled and which owned numerous banks across Texas. Allied’s board
was stacked with Mischer’s close contacts, and provides an inside look at his
sprawling “old boy’s network,’ a network quite possibly utilized by Bush after his
ouster as CIA director.

Among Allied’s board members was the aforementioned Howard Terry, as was
Gerald Smith, who was something of Mischer’s “right-hand man.”®! Smith’s own
banking interests extended beyond Texas and into Louisiana, with apparent ties to
organized crime and intelligence. Smith was co-owner of a bank with Herman
Beebe, the S&L fraudster and mob insider discussed earlier in this chapter.S*
Beebe’s own networks of banks and S&Ls were reportedly financed with heavy
loans from Allied.

During the 1980s, Allied’s co-chairman was one of Mischer’s longtime
associates, Houston investor Jack T. Trotter. Trotter is described in a 1987 issue of
Texas Monthly as having been a “[b]ehind the scenes player in setting the course of
the Houston business community” with an “enormous network” of “people he has
made rich by his deals”? Trotter maintained a decades-long business relationship
with the powerful Duncan family, lorded over by the patriarch John H. Duncan
Sr. Duncan Sr., in the late 1960s, was a director of the Bank of the Southwest —
the Texas banking institution discussed in the previous chapter as being linked to a
number of CIA funding conduits. Trotter and the Duncan family embarked on a
number of business ventures with Gerald D. Hines, another Houston developer
and Mischer associate whose impact on Houston can be seen in his ambitious
construction projects, including the headquarters of Shell and Pennzoil, as well as
the Galleria shopping district (a location that, as we will see in the next chapter,
may have played a role in land speculation schemes linked to Iran-Contra).
Perhaps significantly, Hines will be encountered again in Columbus, Ohio, as the
developer and owner of the building where Leslie Wexner parked his tangled web
of real estate and other holding companies, including companies mentioned that
were mentioned by Columbus police in connection with the murder of his
company’s tax attorney.

A final Allied director worth mentioning is George A. Butler, then the senior
partner at the powerful Houston law firm of Butler, Binion, Rice, Cook and Knapp.
Alongside Trotter, he maintained a spot on the board of the Gulf Resources and
Chemical Corporation of Houston. Gulf Resources had been founded with the aid
of Joseph Patten, a general partner at Bear Stearns. Another Bear Stearns partner
named Raphael Bernstein maintained a place on the Gulf board well into the
1980s.°° Considered a major national security concern due to the role it had played
in producing the bulk of the US’ lithium supply — essential for, among other things,
nuclear weapons — Gulf Resources achieved notoriety in the 1970s when the
company’s president, Robert H. Allen, smuggled funds via a Mexican subsidiary
and bank to Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President. These funds
were then utilized by the Plumbers to finance the Watergate break-ins.“ Allen
would, at one time, serve as the campaign finance chair for one of John Tower's
senate campaigns.

The movement of the Gulf Resources money towards its ultimate destination
was largely facilitated by Bill Liedtke, the founder and president of Pennzoil. Along

with his brother, J. Hugh Liedtke, Bill was one of George H.W. Bush’s original
business partners: they had formed part of the original group that created Zapata
Petroleum. In 1959, Bush and the Liedtkes “decided to split Zapata into two
companies,” with one half becoming Zapata Offshore, and the other half becoming
Pennzoil. A 1976 Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs report lists
Bill Liedtke as a director of the Bank of Texas.®2 This was almost certainly the
Continental Bank of Texas — headquartered in the (Gerald Hines-designed) Shell
Plaza in Houston — which had been formed in 1973 through a merger between
Continental Bank and the Bank of Texas.”2 The President of the merged bank was
Gerald Smith, while the chairman was George Butler. The presence of these two
Mischer cronies is no accident, as Continental Bank of Texas was operating under
the umbrella of Allied Bancshares.

At the time that Bush was purported to have been organizing his own private
intelligence web, he was also making his own forays into the world of banking. On
February 23", 1977, the New York Times reported that he had “been elected a
director of First International Bancshares,” a large Houston bank holding
company." At the same time, he was appointed to the board of its largest holding,
First International Bank, and its London merchant bank subsidiary, First National
Bancshares Ltd. Russ Baker, in his history of the Bush family, writes that “First
International was not your friendly neighborhood bank. Rather it was a Texas
powerhouse whose principals reached well beyond banking into the netherworld
of intelligence and intrigue”? It was particularly close to Saudi interests, which at
the time were investing heavily into Houston real estate and industry, a by-product
of Texas oil interests taking hold in the Middle East and the Gulf states. FIB
reportedly held a “revolving line of credit for Salem bin Laden,” while multiple
sources have linked it to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International — a
powerful and deeply corrupt institution detailed in the next chapter.”

Joe L. Albritton, the longtime chairman of Washington, DC’s Riggs Bank,
maintained a post as director of First International. Riggs was described by the Wall
Street Journal as having “had a longstanding relationship with the Central
Intelligence Agency,” and maintained accounts for a number of infamous figures.
Among these was Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United
States from 1983 to 2005 whose contact information would later appear in Jeffrey
Epstein’s contact book.” In early 2005, Riggs pleaded guilty to money laundering

charges resulting from an extensive Justice Department inquiry into the bank’s
activities.

Sitting alongside Bush and Albritton on the board of First International was
John Murchison of the Murchison oil family. John Murchison was less known that
his counterparts, Clint Murchison Sr. and Jr., but was by no means less prolific
when it came to oil and gas holdings and other business concerns. Interestingly, in
1982, John’s son John Murchison Jr. was appointed to the board of Gulf Resources
and Chemical Corporation following the firm's takeover by a shadowy British
businessman-turned-“tax exile” in Switzerland named Alan Clore.%

First International appears to have been closely linked to Ling-Temco-Vought
(LTV), a major Dallas-based defense contractor that provided the US military
with, among other things, light attack aircraft during the Vietnam War. John
Murchison was listed among the directors of LTV, as was the independent oilman
Edwin L. Cox, also found on the board of First International. In 1970, LTV’s
board was run by a prominent Texas businessman named Robert H. Stewart III,
who, two years later, would organize First International as a holding company for
First National Bank and serve as the institution’s long-running chairman.?8

Much like Walter Mischer, Stewart was incredibly connected both
economically and politically. The 1970 New York Times announcement of his
takeover of the LTV board notes that Senator John Tower was his “very good
friend.” That same article attributes the following quote to Stewart: “I’ve always
been on the conservative side of politics. Some people refer to me as being a little
[to] the right of Louis XIV”? He maintained positions on the boards of numerous
major corporations, including a position as a director at Pepsi from 1965 through
at least 1995. Between the 1960s and 1970s, he was affiliated with Braniff Airways,
which for a time was a subsidiary of LTV. During the 1980s, Mischer served on the
board of this same aviation company122 One important corporate connection for
Stewart was his presence at ARCO, formerly known as Atlantic Richfield, in the
1980s. This was the petroleum company of Robert O. Anderson, a close associate
of the Rockefeller family who spent time at the Council on Foreign Relations at the
same time as George H.W. Bush.+%

The precise relationship between Anderson and Bush is hard to pin down — but
one telling episode involves Atlantic Richfield’s role in developing the expansive
Trans-Alaskan pipeline system. Service for Anderson's companies was provided by
the aviation companies of Phil Bergt, which included Interior Airways and later

Alaska International1™ In 1974, a young George W. Bush traveled to Fairbanks,
Alaska, where he took a job working for Bergt. When asked by Russ Baker how
exactly the younger Bush came to be in his employ, Bergt stated that it was as a
favor to “someone from a Houston construction firm.”2 This becomes all the
more curious when considering Bergt’s claims that Alaska International became
embroiled in intelligence work after the election of President Carter — in other
words, right when Bush was purported to have been setting up his intelligence
network. These were off-the-books operations, Bergt told Baker, “after Jimmy
Carter went in, gutted the CIA, and almost ruined them.” He further alleged that
his connection to the Agency persisted into the Reagan administration, and that
his company had provided support to Southern Air Transport during the Contra
years.

Who was the individual from the Houston construction firm that brought W.
Bush to Bergt’s attention? It’s impossible to say, but one possibility is that it was
Walter Mischer himself. Nothing directly linking the two men has yet been found,
but they both shared a mutual association with Robert O. Anderson. In the early
1950s, Mischer began accumulating land near Lajitas, a small town in West Texas
near the US-Mexico border, and Anderson followed suit in the 1960s by setting up
his Big Bend Ranch. By the early 1980s, the two joined forces, with Anderson
selling half of the ranch’s ownership to Mischer with big plans to “syndicate the
land” and sell “shares to selected colleagues in the Texas establishment”!
Throughout this whole period, Anderson maintained an intriguing business
contact: Clermont Club member Tiny Rowland, a figure that, as will be discussed
later in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, was tied to American and Israeli
intelligence services, and played a rather murky role in the Iran-Contra affair. First
introduced by the shadowy tanker magnate and billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig,
Anderson had sold his ownership of the British Observer to Rowland in 1983.1%
Several years later, Anderson departed ARCO to focus on his private company,
Hondo Oil & Gas. According to the New York Times, the company was “equally
owned by Mr. Anderson and the British conglomerate Lonrho P.L.C? — a global

corporate empire overseen by Rowland1™%

THE SAFARI CLUB

n his book on the Shackley-Wilson private CIA, Joseph Trento describes how this
ensemble of quasi-official intelligence operatives forged a working partnership with
T shadowy covert apparatus known as the Safari Club.+®8 This was a meeting
space for the heads of numerous intelligence agencies that were allied with the
United States in those increasingly heated days of the Cold War. Organizers of the
club included Kamal Adham, the director of Saudi intelligence, as well as his
nephew and successor Turki bin Faisal al Saud. Accompanying them was General
Nassiri, head of Irans SAVAK; Ahmed Duleimi, the Moroccan intelligence
director; and Alexandre de Marenches, the head of Frances Service de
Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation
and Counter-Espionage Service or SDECE). The motivating factor for the club’s
formation was similar to that which had spawned Shackley’s group. The rise of a
reformist tendency within US intelligence and the political system at large limited
the ability of the CIA to operate as it once had. It was into that void that the Safari
Club hoped to step.
Turki bin Faisal discussed the club and its activities during a speech at
Georgetown University:

In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here your intelligence community was literally
tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports,
and it could not pay money. ... In order to compensate for that a group of countries got together
in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari
Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was
that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet

influence worldwide, and especially in Africa 102

Iranian journalist Mohammed Heikal, in Iran: The Untold Story, describes how
bin Faisal’s remarks reflected the development of a series of critical geopolitical
alignments that had been emerging since the early 1970s.412 The Saudi and Iranian
governments were both turning toward Africa as a source of raw materials and as an
emerging market. For them, there was a need to curb the influence of the Soviet
Union on the continent, which was then being felt throughout the myriad of
blossoming anti-colonial movements. These movements challenged the continued
dominance of European powers, particularly that of France, whose African
interests encompassed the global trade in uranium, diamonds, and gold. As a result,
a triangular relationship began to take shape.

The backbone of the club involved not only intelligence sharing but also
economic arrangements that parlayed into a lucrative arms trade. Egypt became a

hotbed of Safari Club activity, with Cairo featuring its first “operation center.” This
center was “equipped to evaluate what was going on in Africa, identifying the
danger spots, and to make recommendations for dealing with them.’+4 At the
same time, Saudi Arabia was lending its Egyptian allies large sums of money, which
were then used to purchase French-produced weapons that soon flooded African
conflict zones. Given that the Saudis provided the financing, Trento writes, they
effectively ran the show. In order to function properly, the Safari Club required a
banking apparatus to marshal and direct its economic resources. The vehicle of
choice was the colossus of dark money and offshore finance known as the Bank of
Credit and Commercial International, discussed at length in the next chapter.
While nominally a Pakistani merchant bank, BCCI was also backed by the Saudi
intelligence directorate, which in turn was closely integrated with the country’s
ruling elite. Likewise, BCCI maintained branches across Europe and the Middle
East; in Cairo, a pivotal city for the Safari Club, the Egyptian branch of the Arab
International Bank operated as a BCCI affiliate.

The Arab International Bank curiously appears as a footnote, albeit perhaps a
significant one, in the history of the US savings and loan crisis. Employed at this
offshore bank for some time as treasurer was Mario Renda, later renowned for
depositing a flood of money from Teamsters union locals in New York City into
various thrifts across the United States. Many of them were intimately intertwined
with organized crime, and many also subsequently collapsed. According to the
testimony of “Colombo family lieutenant” Lawrence Iorizzo, Renda had been
“handling business for Paul Castellano,” the boss of the Gambino crime family.
Prior to these interesting career turns, Renda had formed a business partnership
with a man who was no stranger to the world of the BCCI, arms deals, and
shadowy intelligence networks at-large: Adnan Khashoggi. The Safari Club owed
much to Khashoggi. The name of the group had come from its first meeting place,
the Mount Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki, Kenya, which Khashoggi had purchased
in the mid-1970s. Once a hangout of the older generation of Hollywood stars, the
international jet set, and a slick-heeled group of globe-trotting American mobsters,
the hotel and its surrounding acres had been purchased by the arms dealer for a
mere $900,000. Among Khashoggi’s first acts was to dial up the location's
exclusivity: press reports from the time allude to his plans to close the resort and
“use it all for himself” H This wasn’t exactly accurate. Khashoggi’s plan, it seems,
was to market the facility to an even more select clientele — and to use it as the

private meeting place for the sorts of figures who inhabited the same, strange
netherworld.

Notably, Khashoggi was not the first intelligence-linked figure to be involved
with the Mount Kenya Safari Club. Most accounts of the club note that its rise had
been facilitated by its owners: William Holden, the actor and close friend of
Ronald Reagan, and Ray Ryan, a professional gambler and businessman with
extensive ties to the “hoodlum element.”+ They had acquired the properties
around 1960; but a year earlier, they had visited the club in the company of
columnist Robert Ruark — whose syndicated newspaper writings framed him as an
international adventurer with a strong taste for the exotic - and Ruark’s good
friend Ricardo Sicre. As Ruark tells it, he and Sicre had convinced Holden and
Ryan to purchase the Safari Club.4°During World War II, Sicre had served in the
OSS, participating in the North African and Mediterranean theaters in a covert
group under the direction of Frank Ryan.1/° Outside of the world of intelligence,
Ryan had been a prominent businessman involved in several import/export firms
with a focus on textiles. These business skills came in handy after the war, when
veterans of the OSS and the British intelligence apparatus - and a number of
British merchant banks, Canadian industrialists, and US financiers — formed the
World Commerce Corporation (WCC). Ryan served as the WCC’s president and
Sicre, as its vice president.

While the WCC remains largely unknown, there has been increased interest in
its activities, and various writers and researchers have emphasized different aspects
of the corporation“ Most focus on its function as a commercial cover for
intelligence activities, while others such as Steven Snider have assessed the WCC
in terms of the “special relationship” that exists between the US and the UK.U®
Anthony Cave Brown, the biographer of OSS founder and head William Donovan
— one of the primary movers behind the scenes of the WCC - links the firm to
efforts to rebuild European industry in the aftermath of World War II, while Ralph
Ganis parses out the linkages between the WCC and the construction of the
industrial infrastructure for NATO.U2 When the WCC was first created, it was
reported that its purpose was to bring to an end the dollar shortages of the post-
war era. Such a task was vital for the formation of an international economic order
that was to be led by the US and its European allies. With holdings and interests in
mining, oil, natural gas, film, shipping, agriculture, and tourism, the WCC did
indeed pursue this goal. Was the Holden-Ryan development of the Mount Kenya

Safari Club, carried out at the encouragement of WCC’s vice president Ricardo
Sicre, part of this international dollar-recycling effort?

The idea is not as outrageous as it might sound. As early as 1945, President
Roosevelt and Juan Trippe — the founder of Pan American World Airways — were
locked in discussions about the role international tourism and luxury resorts would
play in attracting dollars to the developing world. Trippe was the brother-in-law of
Edward Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt’s secretary of state, who had a spot on
the WCC board until his untimely death in 1949. To accomplish the goals he had
conceived with Roosevelt, Trippe organized Intercontinental Hotels. Decades later,
Adnan Khashoggi tapped Intercontinental to manage the Safari Club.“° Scratching
the surface of Khashoggi’s own Safari Club takeover also reveals the presence of
intelligence assets. He had been introduced to the club by his public relations
manager, Edward K. Moss, who had been a longtime member. Moss was also
working as a consultant for the Kenyan government, while Khashoggi had his own
business in the country — he was privy to the details of “a planned beach resort and
a World Bank study that projected millions of dollars for the area” These various
strands converged at the Safari Club. As his biographer writes, Khashoggi felt that
the locale “was a Shangri-La.”24

As far back as 1962, Moss had connections to the CIA. That year he was
cleared for ZR/MAJOR, a CIA operation that entailed “the exploitation of
political consultants.” While few details exist as to the exact purpose of the
operation, it was run by the Political Action Group of the Covert Action Staff,
which in turn was overseen by Cord Meyer. It was not Moss’ first encounter
with the Agency: a handwritten memo states that he had “obtained a covert
security approval in 195914 Yet another CIA document refers to Moss as acting
as the “assistant for raising funds against Castro and for public relations matters” to
Tony Varona, the leader of the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council.
Varona is not only known for being one of the CIA’s chief assets in their covert war
against Castro’s Cuba, he was also one of several figures who were connected to the
Agency and organized crime figures Santo Trafficante and John Roselli. CIA files
make it abundantly clear that Moss was working deeply with-in this nexus where
organized crime and intelligence mixed. The aforementioned handwritten memo
alludes to Moss’ “
“operation seems to be government contracts for the underworld and probably

long-standing ‘mafia’ connection” before noting that his

surfaces mafia money in legitimate business activities.’12° The Moss file reports a

rumor that Julia Cellini, sister of Dino Cellini, was Moss’ mistress and operated a
“secretarial service” that was in reality a “front for Edward K. Moss’ activities.’
Moss, furthermore, moved money from Dino Cellini to Varona — yet another clear
example of ClA-organized crime collusion. Throughout the 1950s, Cellini was
Meyer Lansky’s point man in Cuba and helped manage several major National
Crime Syndicate casinos: the Riviera Casino and the Tropicana Club. As noted in
the last chapter, Cellini’s activities brought him into close contact with Charles
Tourine and Joe Nesline.

Peter Dale Scott points out that this nexus raises the specter of human
trafficking and the deployment of sex as a means of political influence. The Cellini
siblings were described in FBI files as active participants in the trade of narcotics
and “white slavery rackets”? Scott adds that this “FBI report suggests an
important shared interest between Moss and Khashoggi: sexual corruption.’2®
More on Khashoggi’s alleged role in sexual blackmail is discussed in the next
chapter as well as chapter 11. Incredibly, the source of the information linking
Moss to organized crime was none other than Edwin Wilson. A CIA internal
memo drafted in 1973 states:

Wilson stated that he had met Moss in 1966 through Frank O’Connell, Washington
representative of the Transport Workers Union. The memorandum also suggests that one of
Wilson’s business associates, Richard S. Cobb, was also having business contacts with Moss....
Wilson stated that ‘subsequent investigation surfaced from [business analysis firm] Dun and
Bradstreet and a verbal report from Dun and Bradstreet recognizing Moss’ longstanding “Mafia”
connections. Moss’ operation seems to be government contracts for the underworld and

probably surfaces Mafia money in legitimate business activities 122

One cannot help but wonder if 1966 was really the earliest encounter between
Wilson and Moss. As mentioned earlier, Wilson’s early tenure in the Agency
included a long stint operating under the auspices of the CIA’s work with the AFL-
CIO, which was overseen by Cord Meyer's International Operations Division. In
March 1962, the International Operations Division merged with the Covert Action
Staff, with Meyer maintaining control of both. The Covert Action Staff under
Meyer was, as previously mentioned, the wing of the CIA that oversaw
ZR/MAJOR, the operation that Moss had been cleared for. It is certainly plausible
that Wilson and Moss crossed paths at this earlier stage. Further indications of the
close-knit nature of this network of individuals comes through JM/WAVE, the
Miami station that oversaw the Cuban exile operations to which Moss was also

connected. Shackley and Clines, Wilson’s closest CIA contacts, spent considerable
time there.

This entire complex was hidden away in the shadows. Through Shackley, the
Safari Club was linked with powerful forces within the domestic opposition to
Carter. The president himself, writes Trento, “had never been briefed on the Safari
Club.”° This was despite advancing corruption within his own administration, as
evidenced by certain Carter officials, such as Clark Clifford, playing a fundamental
role in BCCI’s penetration of the US banking system. By 1980, elements
interwoven through the Safari Club network and Shackley’s private CIA were
mounting international opposition to Carter, laying the groundwork for the arrival
of soon-to-become president Ronald Reagan.

Critical to this effort was a series of meetings held by Le Cercle, a quasi-formal
group composed of representatives from conservative military, intelligence, and
business circles in NATO countries. Since its inception in the 1950s, Le Cercle had
been carefully nurtured by US, British, and French intelligence assets in tandem
with German and Italian industrialists. The upcoming US election was a topic of
conversation at a June 1980 Le Cercle meeting held in Zurich, with the minutes
making reference to the “shattered remains of [Carter’s] foreign policy” and a
“discussion ... about a series of appropriate measures to promote the electoral
campaign of Presidential candidate Reagan against Carter?’ 4+

Among those attending this Le Cercle meeting was Donald Jameson, an old
CIA hand who had retired to take a job at Tetra Tech, a contractor with extensive
interests in the Middle East. Tetra Tech, which was suspected by authorities of
being tied to BCCI, had been founded by another CIA veteran, James Critchfield.
Both Critchfield and Jameson were close to Shackley, and both were attached to his
Research International Associates — a key node in the private CIA network.82

Several days after this Le Cercle meeting, another participant, Brian Crozier —
who, coincidentally, answered for many years to Meyer in the Covert Action Staff -
met personally with Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, the French
intelligence chief, Alexandre De Marenches, met with Reagan’s new campaign
manager, William Casey, in Paris. David Teacher, in his lengthy study of Le Cercle,
points out that this meeting occurred a month prior to the infamous meetings in
Madrid that are suspected to have led to the infamous October Surprise plot,
whereby representatives of Reagan’s campaign are said to have conspired with Iran
to delay the release of hostages until after the 1980 election in order to influence
that election’s outcome. Teacher states: “De Marenches was well-placed to advise

Casey on the Iranian hostage crisis; he had been the driving force behind the
creation of the Safari Club, founded in 1976 to coordinate covert operations
between the French, Iranian, Saudi, and Egyptian intelligence services.”

CASEY’S EARLY WARS

Wim Casey is best remembered as the hawkish director of the CIA during

the final stage of the Cold War — an individual who, to some, strove to
reorient the Agency away from the direction it had taken under the Carter
administration and, to others, somebody who permanently stained the Agency
with the mark of scandal. It was under Casey’s watch that the so-called Iran-Contra
affair (a misnomer, designed to conceal the Reagan administration’s drive toward
global covert war-fare) flourished. By the time he died in early May 1987 from a
fast-moving brain tumor, the scandal had broken wide open, and, one by one, his
former colleagues, underlings, and frontmen were being called to testify.

Casey’s story, however, started long before Oliver North and Richard Secord
arrived on the scene. It began with his education under the Jesuits at Fordham
University in New York City, which had kindled a life-long animosity toward
anything that bore the faintest hint of socialism and an affinity for the Knights of
Malta, to which he belonged. According to Leo Cherne, who later led the CIA-
financed International Rescue Committee, Casey was a prototypical Cold Warrior
by the 1930s. “Bill, from the beginning, was to the right of Attila the Hun,” said
Cherne. When it came to the conflict unfolding in Spain, Casey “was one hundred
percent for Franco ... to understand this, you had to understand his
Catholicism? £3

Cherne’s early acquaintance with Casey had come through the Research
Institute of America, an economic analysis and publishing venture both were
involved in. While the RIA strove to be nonpartisan, Casey deeply opposed the
Roosevelt administrations New Deal. The policies, he felt, smacked of socialistic
impulses and restrained the free functioning of the private sector. This political
orientation opened doors for Casey in certain circles of New York politics, while
the analytic capabilities he had honed at the RIA opened others. In the short term,
however, he worked at the law practice he had formed with his friend Jerry Doran
called Backer, Casey, Doran and Siegel. When that did not pan out, he went to
work at the Board of Economic Warfare.

The Board of Economic Warfare was one of many byzantine wartime
bureaucracies that had been created to deal with the immense logistical quandaries
posed by a truly global war effort. Casey joined the organization in September
1942 as a consultant, but he quickly grew bored with it. He then found himself in
the Navy, but he found himself detailed to the Office of Naval Procurement, where
he carried out basically the same tasks he had at the Board of Economic Warfare.
Then he began to hear rumors about the Office of Strategic Service, led by William
Donovan. As luck would have it, Jerry Doran had joined up with Donovan's law
firm. Through this contact, Casey was able to arrange a meeting with Otto Doering
— “Donovan's right hand man at the OSS” and also a senior partner at Donovan's
law firm. Casey soon found himself in London, the base for all OSS operations in
Europe.4

The OSS London station was overseen by David K. E. Bruce. Much has been
made of the close-knit relationship between the OSS and the moneyed elite -
America’s practical aristocracy populated by dynasties such as the Mellons,
Harrimans, DuPonts, and Morgans. Bruce, too, was a product of this world: he was
married to Ailsa Mellon of the prominent Pittsburgh family. Paul Mellon — Ailsa’s
brother — served in London under Bruce. Although Ailsa Mellon and David Bruce
divorced in 1945, Bruce seems to have stayed in contact with the family. During the
early days of his tenure as US ambassador to the United Kingdom, he was
acquainted with one of the family’s young heirs, William Mellon Hitchcock. As
noted in chapter 4, both would play a role in the Profumo Affair.

Nominally, Casey was a rank-and-file member of the secretariat, a cog in the
intelligence machinery who spent his time drafting reports to be passed to the
upper brass. Perhaps because of Casey’s experience in bureaucracy and background
in research and analysis (or perhaps because of his economic ambitions), Casey
and Bruce developed a close working relationship that propelled the future CIA
director far beyond the ground floor of the OSS.

Through Bruce, he was promoted to the service's inner sanctum, the elite social
matrix that made up the center of power within the intelligence apparatus. Soon,
Casey was granted the title of chief of the OSS Secretariat in the European Theater
of Operations — a position that made him “Donovan's troubleshooter” on the
Continent.4*° Another well-connected OSS man at the London station — who later
inherited Bruce’s position — was J. Russell Forgan. Forgan hailed from the high-
finance circles of Chicago. His father, David R. Forgan, and his uncle, James B.
Forgan, served as presidents of the First National Bank of Chicago. Investors in this

historic institution included Morgan and Harriman interests and James Stillman, a
close ally of the Rockefeller family. James Forgan had also served on the first board
of the Federal Reserve. Russell Forgan followed in his family’s footsteps and
ingratiated himself with the world of Chicago banking. Then, abruptly, in the mid-
1940s, as World War II rumbled to a close, he and William Casey found themselves
tasked with a very different kind of business. As Joseph Persico notes:

General [Donovan] summoned his senior staff and told them that this war had forever ended the
isolation of the United States. He directed an OSS colonel, J. Russell Forgan, to head up a
committee, as he put it, “to study the need for our country to establish on a permanent basis, as
an integral part of the military, a strategic intelligence agency.’ Bill Casey was to serve as the
committee’s secretary. The assignment was to bring Casey in at the creation of what would
ultimately metamorph into the Central Intelligence Agency. As he would tell his staff at Langley

thirty-seven years later, “I was there in the beginning. Nobody saw me. But I was there” 136

After the war, Casey continued to inhabit intelligence, military, and defense
circles. This can be seen in his often overlooked role in cofounding a national
security think-tanked called the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in
1962. The NSIC was essentially an offshoot of a National Security Council
propaganda outfit called the Institute for American Strategy, as evidenced by
NSIC’s cofounder, Frank Barnett, having served there as program director. The
NSIC maintained a presence in intelligence circles over the years and through
Casey’s time as CIA director. It accumulated familiar faces on its board of directors,
including Thomas Moorer. Likewise, NSCI seminars on special operations and
Cold War geopolitical activities were attended by such people as Ted Shackley and
Oliver North. #8

When he wasn’t running Cold War propaganda organizations or practicing law,
Casey spent his days pursuing a future in politics. He planted himself firmly in the
wing of the Republican Party that was opposed to the Nelson and David
Rockefeller centrist faction. His sympathies were with the so-called fiscal
conservatives and the militant anti-Communists. He was in alignment with Roy
Cohn’s good friend William F. Buckley and his National Review, even going so far as
to ghostwrite an anti-Rockefeller essay for the paper. “The thrust of Bill’s article,’
Buckley later said, “was that Rockefeller wanted to lead New York State and then
America away from anti-communism and towards collectivism? +32

The political vehicle that Casey ultimately hitched himself to was Richard
Nixon. Nixon, he reasoned, was a figure far removed from the sort of “Eastern
establishment” cultural circles that had fostered politicians like Nelson Rockefeller.

Furthermore, Nixon was an avid cold warrior and a friend of business. Casey went
to work in an unofficial capacity for Nixon's ill-fated campaign against John F.
Kennedy. While these efforts bore little fruit, he continued to spend the 1960s
aiding Nixon's advance and turning down offers to work on the campaigns of Barry
Goldwater and others.

Nixon's resurgence at the end of the 1960s was Casey’s moment. He dumped
money into the Nixon campaign's coffers and worked to organize a book titled
Nixon on the Issues. He had expected that, in return for his efforts, the incoming
administration would grant him some high-value position — but the long-awaited
offer never came. Instead, Casey resorted to calling on go-betweens to help him
find a position. One of these was his old OSS colleague, J. Russell Forgan, who was
close to Maurice Stans, Nixon’s financial manager and eventual head of the
Committee for the Re-Election of the President. From 1965 to 1969, Stans had
served as president of Glore Forgan, a prominent New York investment house led
in part by Russell Forgan.4“2 Casey’s vision was singular and hewed closely to his
geopolitical bona fides: he wanted a position at the top of the armed forces
pyramid or in the State Department or the CIA. When he finally got an offer from
Nixon, it was as deputy director of the CIA, a position beneath director Richard
Helms, and Casey rejected it. According to Casey biographer Joseph Persico, the
offer bordered on insult: “Dick Helms worked for Casey more than twenty-five
years ago. He had been a junior officer in London when Casey was US intelligence
chief for all of Europe”!® He was equally reluctant about the next offer, but he
eventually accepted. As a result, in 1971, he became the head of the Nixon
administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He held that post
for two years, before holding a series of other positions, including that of
Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs (where he butted heads with Henry
Kissinger), as chairman of the Import-Export Bank, and a spot on the Foreign
Intelligence Advisory board. It is worth pausing for a moment, however, to
examine Casey's tenure at the SEC, because it was there that he crossed paths with
the infamous financial bandit Robert Vesco.

THE “DETROIT KID”

R Vesco was one of the greats in the world of white-collar crime. He was
enowned for his rapid rise and his subsequent fall — which forced him to
become a country-hopping, yet incredibly wealthy, fugitive who courted right-wing

paramilitaries, Colombian cartels, and Cuban Communists with equal ease. He was
something of an enigma.

Mitchell WerBell III, the old OSS China hand who had become a gun for hire
and arms merchant, suspected Vesco of being a CIA asset. He was described by Jim
Hougan in his classic book Spooks as “Watergate’s own Rosetta Stone.’ His
meteoric rise was fueled by his takeover - and subsequent looting - of an
international mutual fund that was, at the very least, adjacent to both organized
crime and the CIA. Not satisfied, he then tried to take control of Resorts
International, the notorious Paradise Island hotel and casino that was tied to these
exact same organized crime and intelligence networks.

The initial object of Vesco’s takeover and looting was Investors Overseas
Services (IOS), the brainchild of the “hippie” entrepreneur, B’nai B'rith activist,
and self-proclaimed Trotskyite Bernie Cornfeld. On the surface, IOS was a peddler
of mutual funds, with its salesmen traveling door-to-door across Europe and
elsewhere hawking their products. These were modest beginnings for something
that later became a global octopus. “Even before Vesco’s advent on the scene,”
writes Hougan, “IOS bordered on the bizarre. It was an underground institution,
the financial equivalent to Thomas Pynchon’s V18 R. T. Naylor, an expert on
offshore finance, sums up IOS: “If Bernie Cornfeld did not invent the modern
technology of capital flight, he did far more than his contemporaries to put it to
work in an imaginative, systematic, and profitable way 144

As Naylor points out, IOS’ early successes were made possible by US-led
economic policies. On the one hand, the status of the dollar as a reserve currency
had opened up the nascent eurodollar markets and created the need for dollar
recycling. IOS fit nicely into each. On the other hand, there was the IMF's
encouragement for developing countries to loosen controls on capital flows. The
flight of capital from these countries often saw that capital going right into
investments in the United States and Europe, as well as into other developing
zones. The IMF's policies often created a business boom, though not necessarily in
the countries it was professing to help, and Cornfeld capitalized on these and
related policies to turn IOS and its web of mutual funds into a veritable sponge for
soaking up all of this now-available capital. IOS salesmen and couriers descended
on developing countries, criss-crossed war zones, and forged alliances with
dictators, offering investment opportunities and access to bank accounts in
Luxembourg, Geneva, and the Bahamas.

In managing this ever-ballooning mass of hot money, Cornfeld and IOS
cultivated a close working relationship with a very peculiar banker: Tibor
Rosenbaum. As previously mentioned, the Geneva-based money-man’s
International Credit Bank was a favored repository for the funds of both Meyer
Lanksy and the Mossad.**° Rosenbaum even went so far as to take credit for being
the person who first pointed out the benefits of a mutual fund scheme to Cornfeld.
The result was the creation of IOS’ first major financial entity, the International
Investment Trust, which launched in 1962.

Rosenbaum was not the only figure involved with Mossad that Cornfeld had
buddied up with. There was also Bruce Rappaport, the banker, tanker magnate, and
financial criminal who was among William Casey’s closest friends. According to
criminologist Alan Block, Rappaport once bailed Cornfeld out of jail in
Switzerland.“* Importantly, IOS was supported by Bank van Embden, which
owned a portion of Rappaport’s own banking complex, Inter Maritime Bank. “In
October 1970,” Block notes, “British bankers discovered that Bank van Embden
was either a subsidiary or an affiliate of Banque Occidentale, owned by James
Goldsmith” - the Clermont Club member, corporate raider and another figure
who would later appear repeatedly in the nexus that later surrounded Robert
Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.“2

While IOS was rapidly expanding internationally, an unrelated corporate
complex, the International Controls Corporation, was carrying out a series of rapid
acquisitions in the United States. At the helm of ICC was Robert Vesco. Vesco’s
main tactic was to borrow money to finance takeovers and then use the assets of
the captured companies to pay off the loans. This ensured a stellar credit rating and,
with a few strategic moves, Vesco was soon offering shares of his newly minted
empire on the stock exchange.

Vesco, known as the “Detroit Kid,’ targeted troubled, mid-sized industrial
outfits for his early acquisitions. One of his first ventures was Captive Seal, a
manufacturer of parts for missile technology. The company had been floundering,
but Vesco managed to turn it around by courting an investment capital firm called
HH Industries — a co-owner of which was Baron Edmond de Rothschild.* To
illustrate the incestuous nature of these business networks, this was the same Baron
Rothschild who had organized the Israel Corporation — “Israel’s largest investment
company,” designed to “encourage large-scale private investment in Israel” — with

none other than Tibor Rosenbaum.42

It seems to have been the Rothschild connection that put IOS on Vesco’s radar
sometime between 1967 and 1968. According to Arthur Herzog, Vesco’s
biographer, Baron Rothschild had bragged to Henry Buhl III, then the newly
minted president of the International Investment Trust, of the successes of Captive
Seal.+® Shortly thereafter, George Karlweiss — an agent of Edmond de Rothschild’s
Banque Privée — brokered an introduction of Vesco to Buhl. From there it was off
to the races: at Buhl’s discretion, IOS began to purchase ICC shares. Vesco was
being propelled upward.

The Detroit Kid made his move when IOS began to feel a liquidity crunch.
There was a certain irony to this: while IOS controlled an unfathomable sum of
money, it was not always readily accessible for above-board economic purposes.
Vesco offered to bail out IOS in exchange for a high degree of control over the
company. What happened next was described by Jim Hougan as “a masterpiece of
unarmed robbery.... A newly created Bahamian subsidiary of International
Controls — ICC Investments, Inc. — was the lender to IOS. What Vesco did was
have ICC Investments borrow five million from a Wall Street brokerage house, the
money to be repaid in six weeks. He then convinced the owner of Butler’s Bank in
the Bahamas (also undergoing a liquidity crisis) to lend ICC Investments five

million dollars to repay the six-week loan? 1%

From here, Vesco structured the loan
agreement to IOS so that it would extend the five million to ease the liquidity
crunch, minus $350,000 — which was used to cover the financing cost of the Wall
Street brokerage. With the remaining money, Vesco took control of IOS and then
directed the company to repay the loan that had been taken from Butler’s Bank.
Vesco, in other words, had used IOS’ own funds to finance its takeover. Next, he
began to systematically purge the board of older Cornfeld loyalists and effectively
consolidated control over one of the world’s largest offshore financial institutions.
Finally, through a bizarre web of shell companies and fronts — organized with IOS
money — Vesco began to sell off IOS assets, call in debts, and simply pocket large
sums of money.

The systematic looting of IOS quickly caught the attention of Stanley Sporkin,
head of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. The way that Sporkin has told the story,
the resulting SEC investigation was a noble effort that had been greenlit by his
boss, William Casey. The SEC began to freeze Vesco’s accounts abroad, with the
goal of slowing the torrents of money that were flowing out of IOS (and by
extension, the pockets of those who had bought IOS mutual funds). Yet, these
successes were short lived. There was the matter of a $250,000 campaign

contribution Vesco had made to Nixon’s Campaign for the Re-Election of the
President. Incredibly, a portion of this contribution was used to finance the
Watergate break-ins. Almost immediately, Casey began to pump the brakes on
Sporkin’s efforts. Vesco, meanwhile, sought a one-on-one meeting with Casey.

Questions have been raised regarding Casey's impartiality when it came to the
IOS. The reason for this was a strange little company he had been involved with,
starting in 1968, that was called Multiponics. The company would follow Casey
like a ghost and rear its head to haunt him again and again. Multiponics — formerly
named Ivanhoe Associates — was ostensibly organized “to engage in farming
operations, agribusiness, and the acquisition of land.”+°3 A mere three years after it
launched, Multiponics was bankrupt with hints of suspect activity everywhere. The
company, for example, had acquired the mortgage debts of all of its organizers —
Casey’s included. Multiponics’ investors were never informed of this function of
the company. Nevertheless, the money they had put into Multiponics shares
inevitably went, without their knowledge or consent, into paying down these
mortgage debts. Helping to organize the Multiponics stock offering was none other
than Glore Forgan — the firm of Casey’s old OSS comrade J. Russell Forgan.
Lawrence F. Orbe, “an advisor in the corporate finance department of Glore
Forgan,” maintained a spot on the board of Multiponics.*

The primary investor in Multiponics just so happened to be International
Investment Trust, the leading mutual fund of IOS. What this meant is that Casey,
as head of the SEC and the person ultimately in charge of the investigation into
Vesco, had business interests that were intimately interwoven throughout Vesco’s
affairs. There is little doubt that Vesco understood the precarious position that
Casey was in. It was later revealed that, while he had sought a back channel to
Casey, he had also been preparing potential legal action against him. The purpose
of Multiponics, Vesco argued, had been “to take over the personal interests of Mr.
Casey and others in certain farming operations ... at values subsequently
determined to be inflated” +55 Vesco, in other words, was charging that Casey, the
Glore Forgan crew and their other colleagues in Multiponics had committed fraud
against IOS. Intriguingly, Vesco’s subsequent flight to Costa Rica — the beginning of
his grand tour of the Caribbean and Latin America — occurred in February 1973,
the same month that Casey resigned from the SEC. There is no evidence to suggest
that the two events were related, although a subsequent “grand jury found evidence

that [Casey’s successor at the SEC, Bradford Cook] and Casey ... directly
interfered” with the SEC’s investigation into Vesco and IOS.45°

Years later, an informant and US Customs contract agent named Joe Kelso
arrived in Costa Rica on the trail of a fugitive drug dealer. While he never found his
target, Kelso did discover Vesco’s private jet, tucked away inside a hanger paid for
by a shrimp company called Frigorificos de Puntarenas.1~ Frigorificos was, as
stated in a CIA Inspector General's report, “among the companies that were used
by the Department of State in the mid-1980s to channel humanitarian aid to the
Contras." The report goes on to acknowledge that the company and its
operators, Frank Chanes and Moises Nuñez - the latter a “narcotics officer in the
Government of Costa Rica” — were linked to the international transport of cocaine
and the laundering of drug money, per US Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) reports. The Kerry Committee report, meanwhile, further identified
Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, a money launderer tied to the Colombian cartels, and
Luis Rodriguez, a convicted narcotics trafficker, as other Frigorificos principals.

That Vesco would appear in direct proximity to Colombian narcotics traffickers
is not surprising. In the early 1980s, drug smuggler George Jung testified that
Carlos Lehder, a high-level trafficker from the Medellin drug cartel, had partnered
with Robert Vesco in moving cocaine through the Bahamas.*? Lehder later
confirmed Jung’s claim. When he was called to testify in the 1991 trial against
Manuel Noriega, Lehder identified Vesco as of one his partners in the Bahamas

since the early 1980s.1©

INSIDE “BILLYGATE”

O= of the scandals that dogged President Carter in the waning days of his

administration was the so-called “Billygate” affair. “Billygate” was named for
the president’s brother, Billy Carter, and focused on the ties he had cultivated with
the government of Libya. Billygate became a media circus throughout late 1979, as
a Senate inquiry heated up and widespread dissent rippled through the Democratic
Party. A Christian Science Monitor article from the summer of 1980 is particularly
revealing, as it addresses the way the scandal prevented Carter from focusing more
attention on Reagan during election season and describes the rise of an anti-Carter
bloc within his party:

Washington reporters are hearing from Democratic leaders all over the United States — in office
or out, and usually in private — who say they would really prefer to have Carter step aside or be
forced to step aside.
This growing anxiety — “call it fear,’ one congressman says — is that the President will not only
lose badly but will bring about the defeat of a lot of Democrats in marginal seats and possibly
161

elect a GOP-controlled House and Senate.

Billygate came about in the context of deepening tensions between the US
government and Libya, and in particular via an effort launched by Gaddafi's
government to influence the American population with the hopes of influencing
American policy decisions. Under the leadership of Ahmad al-Shahati, the head of
the Libyan Foreign Liaison Office, a program was organized to invite “prominent
US. citizens and business organizations” to Libya.+62 In March, 1978, efforts were
made to involve Billy Carter in the program. The connection that was established
between the Libyans and Billy was rather tenuous: according to the Senate report
on the matter, Michele Papa, a Sicilian lawyer and founder of the Sicilian-Arab
Association, told an Atlanta-based real estate broker named Mario Leanza that if
“he could get Billy Carter to come to Libya, Leanza could make a lot of money? +63
Arrangements were made through mutual associates to establish contact between a
Libyan ambassador and Billy, and Leanza did receive money for his role.

After Billy did make a trip to Libya, he helped arrange for a Libyan delegation
to visit Georgia in early 1979. He acted as something of a “goodwill ambassador,”
and promoted plans for the formation of a “Libyan-Arab-Georgian friendship
society” 1° Plans were also hatched for a commodity exchange program, where
Libyans would purchase goods produced in Georgia and Billy would use his
connections to help Libya sell its own commodities — namely, oil — on the open
market. To help facilitate these arrangements, the Carter administration's director
of the Office of Budget and Management, Bert Lance, recommended the services
of a “knowledgeable London banker.” Lance would later tell investigators that he
had recommended the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI).1% As
previously noted and as will be discussed in detail the next chapter, BCCI was an
incredibly corrupt institution, with deep ties to a web of intelligence agencies and
linkages to various covert operations, terrorist organization, drug smugglers, and
money launderers.

The presence of BCCI suggests that more was likely going on behind the
scenes — and Joseph Trento, in his history of the Shackley network, concurs.
According to his sources in the intelligence community, “Israeli intelligence

decided to compromise the president through his brother, Billy’1°2 The job was

outsourced to the private CIA, with Thomas Clines making arrangements to
convince the Libyans “that Billy Carter should be put on their payroll as a goodwill
ambassador. This would be devastating to President Carter and very useful to the
Republicans in 1980468

A dense nebula of backroom business dealings, power plays, and dirty tricks
characterized the events that unfolded around the Billy Carter-Libya relationship.
One way to begin exploring that nexus can be found through the Florida holdings
of the powerful DuPont family, which by the 1970s and 80s had become involved
with the CIA’s aviation complex. The family’s interest in the state were overseen by
Alfred I. DuPont, who set up shop there in 1926. DuPont’s early Florida affairs
revolved around real estate investments, which soon developed into a sprawling
empire with countless holdings that were eventually managed by the Alfred I.
DuPont Testamentary Trust. Administrating this vast financial complex was Ed
Ball, a prominent Florida financier whose sister Jessie had married Alfred DuPont.
When DuPont died in 1935, the Trust was left in Jessie's hands — and Jessie turned
it over to Ball.

Thanks to DuPont’s accumulation of different holdings and assets, Ball
controlled, according to Florida senator Claude Pepper, a “great machine which he
operates and manipulates.... Every string which controls this vast empire runs
through the fingers of Mr. Edward Ball”162 Besides the real estate holdings, the
railroads, the shipping companies, and the heavy industries, the major locus of
Ball’s influence and power was the control he wielded over the state’s banking
system. This had its origins in the 1930s, with the DuPont’s takeover of Florida
National banks, which were then used as the vehicle to buy up beleaguered lending

institutions throughout the state. Soon, DuPont maintained - and Ball
administered — a sprawling banking complex that held an estimated $530 million in
deposits. 2

The DuPont-Ball banks may have been intertwined with Paul Helliwell’s
banking network. A list of Florida National Group banks, published in the records
of a 1964 US government inquiry into DuPont and Ball as part of a wider
investigation into holding company practices, lists Helliwell’s Bank of Perrine-
Cutler Ridge as being owned by this umbrella group.+= Also listed was Miami

National Bank, the Helliwell-represented bank that had been set up with the aid of

a Teamster pension fund loan.

By the late 1960s, Ball’s domination of Florida was drawing the ire of
government regulators and politicians. Moves were being made to force the
DuPont Trust to divest of a sizable chunk of its holdings. As a result, Ball turned to
his friend Raymond Mason. Mason bought up some of Ball’s real estate, and a
proposition was made whereby the concern Charter Company would take control
of the lucrative St. Joe Paper Company. The problem, however, was that Charter (at
this point) was a much smaller company and lacked the capital requirements
necessary to maintain St. Joe. A potential solution arose with a proposed takeover
of Charter by Occidental Petroleum, the oil concern controlled by businessman
Armand Hammer — who maintained a spot on the board of Ball’s Florida National
Bank of Jacksonville.“ The sale of Charter to Occidental fell apart, though by no
means ended the relationship between the two companies, which remained quite
cozy. However, the failed acquisition also doomed Charter’s planned purchase of
St. Joe. Yet, in 1972, Charter and St. Joe swapped stock in one another. By this
point, Ball had partially divested the DuPont Trust from Florida National Banks,
while stepping down as chairman. However, they still maintained the dominant
position, and he took up a new position as the bank’s controlling “coordinator” +74
In the course of the Charter-St. Joe stock swap, Mason ended up controlling 8% of
St. Joe and Ball controlled 22% of Charter.

The same year as the stock swap, Mason and Ball toyed with the idea of
purchasing IOS. Just like the Occidental Petroleum affair, this buy-out never took
place. According to Robert Vesco’s biographer Arthur Herzog, Ed Ball had told
Vesco “I had a dream. You and I slept together on a cold night. In the morning, you
had all the blankets?” + Still, Mason and Ball maintained close ties to Vesco, who,
after becoming an international fugitive, cozied up to Gaddafis government in
Libya, which was an important source of crude oil for Charter. Interestingly,
Armand Hammer was also a player in the world of Libyan oil — to quote from
Edward Jay Epstein’s book Dossier, the oil magnate:

...managed in the 1960s to obtain a huge concession for Occidental in Libya by paying a
multimillion-dollar bribe to a key official in the Libyan court. It was one of the few concessions in
the Middle East not controlled by major international oil companies, and Hammer made a
fortune that he then used to finance immense barter deals with the Soviet Union. He also used
his Libyan oil to undermine the power of established oil companies, and in doing so, he radically

changed the rules of the international oil business. 26

How Charter entangled itself in the complex world of Libyan oil affairs cuts
right to the core of the “Billygate” scandal, and possibly links to the wider web of

“renegade” intelligence operations and private intelligence networks that have been
the subject of this chapter. The lynchpin here, however, was a company called
Carey Energy, headed by Edward Carey — the brother of New York governor Hugh
Carey and the mob-linked petroleum seller Martin Carey. Hugh and Martin Carey
are both discussed elsewhere in this book: Hugh in chapter 11, and Martin in
chapter 7.

Alan Block notes that Carey and his oil business were “exceptionally close” to
the Kulukundis clan, the Greek shipping dynasty, and its patriarch, Elias J.
Kulukundis, who at this time was managing the Burmah Oil Tankers Corporation
(a subsidiary of the major British oil concern, Burmah Oil, from which British
Petroleum sprang).*~ As discussed in chapter 3, the interests of the Kulukundis
family interlocked with those of Bruce Rappaport, while the family’s in-laws and
business partners, the Mavroleons, were later linked to Jeffrey Epstein and
Ghislaine Maxwell (see chapter 15 for more on that connection). Through Elias’
position at Burmah Oil Tankers, the Kulukundis family maintained a presence near
the center of power in the Bahamas. Burmah Oil and the Bahamas Development
Corporation co-owned an oil transport facility, located in Freeport on Grand
Bahama, while Kulukundis “maintained an apartment in New York for the use of
Bahamian government officials? +8

Carey Energy also had a presence in the Bahamas, where it owned the majority
stake in a Freeport-based oil refinery called Borco and this facility would have been
directly linked to the transport terminal controlled by Kulukundis. Borco
processed crude oil from Libya and Iran — yet, somewhere along the way, Carey
Energy had ran afoul of the Libyan government, as one of its holdings had
defaulted on oil payments to the country’s state-owned oil company. Facing
bankruptcy, Carey began searching for a buyer for his company — and it caught the
eye of Charter Oil.

How Carey Energy and Charter first connected is unclear. Through Carey’s
family connections, Carey Energy was plugged into the world of New York politics,
while through the company’s executive vice president, Jack McGregor, it had a line
to the Carter family. McGregor, according to government documents related to the
Billygate affair, was an informal advisor to Billy Carter during the time that the
president’s brother was making his own forays into Libyan business. Finally,
through its presence in Libya, Carey Energy likely brushed up against the interests
of Hammer and Vesco — both of whom moved in and out of the Charter Oil orbit.

Indeed, Vesco offered his “services” to Charter Oil — for a fee. He would use his
leverage with the Libyans to put pressure on Carey to help move the negotiations
along. In a statement given to congressional investigators, Charter Oil chief
financial officer J. Steven Wilson stated that Vesco had contacted Raymond Mason
concerning a potential acquisition by Charter of three former IOS subsidiaries that
were then in liquidation. In June 1978, Wilson and other Charter executives
traveled to the Bahamas to meet with Vesco. Wilson and Mason then paid a follow-
up visit to the fugitive in September 1978, and then again in January 1979, when
they were in the Bahamas “for the purpose of working on Charter’s ... acquisition
of Borco.”+~ The way that Wilson tells the story, there were never any plans to do
business with Vesco due to the financier’s precarious legal situation. Nevertheless,
these meetings between Charter and Vesco did take place and, during at least one
of them, the “Borco acquisition was discussed.”482 Then, in March of 1979 -
shortly after Charter took control of Carey Energy — Vesco began calling Mason,
“claiming that he had been instrumental” in the acquisition and was “entitled to a
$5 million finder’s fee.”1*+ Charter, for their part, claimed that they had never
enlisted the aid of Vesco, and therefore were not required to make any payments.

While Charter’s denial was accepted by the government, accusations to the
contrary continued to arise. These were compounded by the fact that, in the wake
of the purchase of Carey Energy, Billy Carter’s friend Jack McGregor had taken a
position at Charter. Several months later, in August of 1979, Billy Carter signed an
agreement with Charter to help the company “obtain additional Libyan oil”+82
“Allegations have been made in the press,” reads one intriguing footnote in the
Senate report on “Billygate,” “that Billy Carter’s oil deal with Charter Oil was
engineered by Robert Vesco as part of a larger scheme to influence the US
government to deliver planes to Libya.’3

The planes in question were Boeing jumbo jets and C-130 and Lockheed L-
100 cargo transport aircraft. They had been ordered by Libya from American
manufacturers but had been blocked due to an export ban to the country, which
had established by the Carter administration’s State Department in fall of 1978.4%4
Vesco had inserted himself into this mix, which sparked a series of plots and
counterplots that caused considerable problems for the Carter administration
between 1979 and 1980. “If they [the State Department] would release the
airplanes,” Vesco told co-conspirator James W. Brewer, “then the [unidentified]

people in Washington can get paid [$7.5 million] out of the airplane deal and I can
get paid [$7.5 million].”48>

For years, Brewer had been an on-again, off-again special assistant for Shearn
Moody Jr. while the latter was acting as head of ANICO. He also exemplified the
Moody family’s tendency to climb into bed with organized crime types: Brewer
had a long history of associations with the criminal element, and was a repeat
offender for his participation in fraud schemes. One such scheme had gotten him
into trouble in 1978 and, in exchange for his freedom, Brewer had agreed to
become an FBI informant. As one Senate report reads, Brewer “helped the Miami
office of the FBI uncover offshore bank scandals involving phony or improperly
used cashier’s checks, letters of credit, or securities. He offered opportunities to
individuals, ‘targets’ presumably predisposed to commit crimes and reported the
targets conduct to the FBI”186 Brewer, in other words, was moved around the
board by the FBI like a chess piece and was used to set up sting operations against
persons of interest.

One such target was James C. Day. A former Texas state representative, Day
had become a lobbyist on Capitol Hill for ANICO, and had also cultivated deeper
organized crime ties. For example, one of his business partners was Leonard
Capaldi, who was “alleged by law enforcement ... to be a major representative of
the Houston [Texas] interests of several Mid-west and Eastern mob families.”
During the early 1980s, he would again emerge as a major borrower at Houston's
Mainland Savings, where — as will be discussed in the next chapter — Adnan
Khashoggi and others tied to intelligence operations could be found.1®2 Day had
cultivated contacts deep within the halls of the Carter administration, and in April
1978, he told Brewer that White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and DNC
chairman John C. White “were not too confident that Carter was going to make it
again and they were interested in deals to make money? +88

The details of what happened next are muddled. Brewer claims that Day asked
him to contact Vesco to try and arrange something for Jordan and White. However,
according to Day, the plan to bring Vesco into the mix was Brewer's idea.
Regardless, Brewer, Day, and another ANICO aide named James Wohlenhaus
traveled to the Bahamas to meet personally with Vesco. It was the first of several
trips, with the issue of the planes becoming an increasingly important focus for this
unlikely crew. Day brought the issue to White’s attention and, immediately
following an October trip to the Bahamas, the State Department released a handful

of the planes — and with the FBI, all the while, quietly observing the succession of
events.

Yet, there is also the possibility that the FBI had a hand in instigating these very
events. After the release of the planes, Vesco claimed to Day that the Libyans had
not paid him, and therefore Day himself could not receive his agreed-upon cut.
Day, meanwhile, suspected that Vesco had in fact been paid. At this point, Day
hoped to extricate himself from the affair —- but Brewer, perhaps at the request of
the FBI, kept Day in play by arranging for one of his associates, a man named James
Feeney, to pay him the money owed in exchange for a cut of future profits in
dealings with the Libyans, Vesco, and Carter administration officials. Incredibly,
Day himself knew that Brewer was an FBI informant.22 What neither Brewer and
Day knew, however, is that Feeney himself was soon to become an informant
himself, this time for the Southern District of New York, which was hoping to get a
chance to nab Vesco.+2

There’s also the question of why ANICO featured so prominently in this
operation, with three associates of the company and the Moody family - Brewer,
Day and Wohlenhaus - acting as the intermediaries between Carter administration
officials like White and Vesco. As previously mentioned, the Moody family had ties
into the old power structure of the FBI via Hoover ally Roy Cohn and Shearn
Moody Jr. was said to supply “many little boys of the night” to Cohn and other
guests visiting his ranch who were so inclined. Cohn, by the time of Billygate and
the plane affair, was gearing up to act as an informal advisor to soon-to-be
president Ronald Reagan. As will be mentioned in chapter 10, Cohn was also
reportedly involved in an effort to blackmail Carter during this period, via his chief
of staff Hamilton Jordan over Jordan's alleged cocaine use at New York's Studio 54.

Importantly, both Shearn Moody and Cohn popped up in the course of the
scheming: Cohn’s law partner was representing Kevin Krown, who was under
investigation along with Feeney by the Southern District of New York. In
September, 1979, Brewer attended a dinner with Moody, Cohn, and Wohlenhaus,
where both the investigation into Krown and Feeney and the plane affair were
discussed. According to a Senate report, “Moody told Wohlenhaus that they ‘were
gonna go to the Federal D.A. and try to make a deal to get them off the hook on the
hot check charges by telling the Libyan plane story and adding a bit to it’”424
Subsequently, “Krown wrote a scenario ‘about all the players, the Brewers, the
Feeneys, the Days, the Vescos, and gave it to John Doyle, the Chief of the Criminal

Division in the Southern District”2* Given the political connections and

orientation of Cohn and Moody, one cannot help but wonder if much of this was
carried out to embarrass an already flailing Carter administration.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long at all for word of these schemes to reach the
press. Vesco himself directly leaked information to Jack Anderson, who wrote
twelve columns on the subject between September and October 1979. “They
described how Vesco tried to wriggle free of the Justice Department's extradition
requests by seeking the assistance of high level Carter officials including Hamilton
Jordan.’? To make matters worse for the administration, recordings Feeney made
of his conversations with various conspirators were shown to the press by aides of
Senator Orrin Hatch (who, as we will see, was connected to Adnan Khashoggi, the
Bank for Commerce and Credit International, and other intelligence assets). As the
Washington Post reported:

An exotic cast appears in the tapes. The names, spoken by Feeney, Vesco, at least two other
convicted swindlers, and Libyan diplomats, include Billy Carter and John C. White, chairman of
the Democratic National Committee ... Hatch, in a phone interview, said he wanted, no
dissemination of unsubstantiated allegations, but thought reporters should be able to sample for
themselves the technical“quality” of the tapes. The quality of the segment was excellent. The
obviously sensitive tapes — raw files with a high potential to besmirch the reputations of possibly
innocent persons and even to affect the presidential election campaign — had been closely
husbanded by federal prosecutors for an investigation that began 19 months ago and has involved

formal presentations to a grand jury since last fal] 424

Vesco himself had told Senate investigators about the existence of the tapes,
effectively widening the probe — just as he had done earlier with the Anderson leak.
This raises the possibility that Vesco’s role here was aimed at getting the US to drop
its extradition efforts against him. Yet, if there was more to it than that, the next
question is: who was Vesco working for or with? One possibility is that he was
aiding Shackley’s “private CIA” network, which of course maintained a deep
presence in Libya throughout this whole period, allegedly had information
concerning Billy Carter’s business there, and had been involved in dirty tricks
against the Carter administration.

There is at least one demonstrable link between the worlds of Vesco and that of
Shackley where Libya is concerned. Deeply involved in the sale of IOS subsidiaries
during the liquidation phase of the mutual fund’s existence was Edward du Cann, a
high-ranking official in the UK Conservative Party (among other things, du Cann
played a key role in Margaret Thatcher’s early political rise). By 1972, he was
serving as the chairman of Keyser Ullman, a major British banking concern with
interests across Europe and in the United States. Keyser Ullman was also tied to

Jack Dellal, a Clermont Club member who would later fund a suspect, intelligence-
linked company headed by Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Christine (see Chapter
21). “Du Cann,’ states his obituary concerning this period, “was at the heart of a
mass of intricate — and generally shady — financial maneuverings.”/2° Some of these
included the tattered ruins of IOS. They also involved Lonrho, the massive
international conglomerate controlled by the corporate raider Roland “Tiny”
Rowland, another Clermont Club member. Keyser Ullman had become Lonrho’s
bank of choice, and du Cann was added to the company’s board. He would
eventually achieve the position as chairman, overseeing a sprawling network of
corporate affiliates and subsidiaries that criss-crossed every economic sector — with
a particular focus on mineral extraction in Africa. Lonrho and Tiny Rowland will
be discussed more in the next chapter. For now, it’s important to note that
Rowland’s ties to the world of intelligence and covert operations were plenty. He
had deep ties to American, British, and Israeli intelligence services, and his African
holdings often acted as cover for Mossad agents. He appeared repeatedly in the
course of the Iran-Contra affair, and he had complex — sometimes harmonious,
sometimes tense — relationships with figures like Adnan Khashoggi. Rowland was
also close to Robert Maxwell, and reportedly helped peddle the bugged PROMIS
software to his political contacts. All in all, Rowland was a well-heeled operator,
known for his ruthless, buccaneering ways.

It is unsurprising, then, that Lonrho’s tentacles reached into Libya, right up to
the highest levels of its government. A Lonrho subsidiary, Tradewinds Air
Holdings, maintained a heavy presence in the country, and counted among its
board members Ahmed Gaddafadam, the cousin of and security advisor to Colonel
Gaddafi (du Cann himself was another director).+ Tradewinds became a subject
of interest in British parliament, especially after a letter written to the British
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry by Mohamed al-Fayed, chairman of
Harrods department store and, for a time, the husband of Samira Khashoggi,
Adnan Khashoggi’s sister. Mohamed and Samira’s son, Dodi Fayed, would later
become romantically involved with Princess Diana of Wales and die with her in the
infamous 1997 car crash.

Mohamed al-Fayed had been partners with Lonrho and Rowland for a period
in the 1970s, but by the 1980s they had become bitter enemies, with Rowland
seeking to carry out a hostile takeover of Mohamed’s economic interests. In the
letter, Mohamed outlined a series of charges against Lonrho. While most of these
concerned their business practices, they also included allegations of arms dealing

and ties with the infamous Edwin Wilson. To quote from Mohamed al-Fayed’s
letter:

...the Lonrho subsidiary Tradewinds has been named as the carrier in deals whereby ex-CIA
agent, Edwin P. Wilson, shipped to Libya its weapons of terrorism. Wilson is presently serving 52
years in a US prison for his enterprise whilst, interestingly, a co-director in Tradewinds with
Messrs Rowland, du Cann and [Robert] Dunlop, from April 1981 to May 1983, was the head of
Libyan “security,” Ahmed el Gaddafadam, a cousin of Colonel Gaddafi.

Until 1983, Lonrho’s 40 per cent partner in Tradewinds was Ashraf Marwan who, however,
served only fleetingly as a director and it is possible that he was acting merely as a front for Libyan
interests. It is something of a coincidence that Wilson should have been arrested, Marwan sold
his shareholding and Gaddafadam resigned as a director almost at the same time. A Sunday
Times article of 1984 ... gave some background on the Marwan/Libya involvement and it is
interesting that Gaddafadam cited Marwan’s office as his address in the notification of his

directorship to Companies House.128

To summarize: Tradewinds, a subsidiary of Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho, was
involved in Libya and was named as a player in arms dealings, including shipping
weapons on behalf of Edwin Wilson - in other words, on behalf of Shackley’s
“private CIA.” At the same time, Lonrho’s chairman - and Tradewinds director -
Edward du Cann had previously been involved in liquidations and acquisitions of
IOS subsidiaries, thus placing him in the direct orbit of Robert Vesco. Vesco, at the
same time that Shackley’s group was active in Libya, became embroiled in not one
but two potentially interrelated Libyan business and political affairs that reached
into the Carter administration. The first of these was the strange dealings with
Charter Oil, and the second was the plane affair. The latter in particular proved to
be incredibly embarrassing for the administration, right at a time when a connected
network of individuals and entities — including Shackley and his associates — were
working to undermine Carter.

It is also worth noting that Charter Oil did not only have ties to the Carters via
Jack McGregor and Billy Carter. In 1980, 13.7% of the common shares of Charter
were held by American Financial Corporation, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based flagship
company of Carl Lindner. According to press reports, Lindner was “advising
Charter chairman Raymond Mason on some corporate ventures”! The secretive
Lindner was a major Republican supporter, and was a particularly tight business
associate of Max Fisher, who was described as having a “close, personal

relationship” with Reagan and is regarded as Leslie Wexner’s mentor.2~

LEGAL AFFAIRS

few short years before he became Reagan's campaign manager and prior the
A eruption of “Billygate,” William Casey had returned to the world of private

legal practice. He arrived at the offices of Rogers & Wells, one of New York
City’s impressive white-shoe law firms. Renowned for its litigation division, the
“Rogers” of Rogers & Wells was William P. Rogers, who had been a longtime
confidant of Richard Nixon and served as his Secretary of State until 1973. The
“Wells,” on the other hand, was John A. Wells. During his tenure as head of Nixon’s
SEC, Casey had recruited Wells to oversee a committee evaluating the
commission's policies and practices. It was just another step in a long friendship;
Casey and Wells had been close since they had first met during Nixons 1960
presidential campaign.

During the course of Casey’s nomination for the leading position in the CIA,
Rogers & Wells had furnished a list of clients with whom he had worked between
1976 and 1981.2% A perusal of the list reveals some of Casey’s close friends and
business associates. It includes, for example, Antony Fisher, who cofounded a
proto-Reaganomics think-tank called the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
with Casey. There was also Science Life Systems, which Casey had formed with
William Simon, a fellow Knight of Malta, who had served as Nixon's Treasury
Secretary and would later reappear in connection with the Covenant House
controversy (discussed in chapter 10). Science Life Systems was a “chain of
computerized fitness spas,’ which was pitched to the governing body of the
Olympic Games as a service for athletes. Simon was, at the time, the treasurer of

202 Another client of Casey’s was Bear Stearns, the major

the Olympic Committee.
New York investment bank. Casey’s legal work on behalf of Bear Stearns coincided
with the promotion of Alan Greenberg to the position of CEO, which he would
maintain until the early 1990s. It also coincided with the arrival of Jeffrey Epstein,
who rose rapidly through the ranks of the bank until his abrupt departure in 1981.
This, curiously enough, was the same year that Casey left private law and returned
to government service as CIA director.

A close examination of other Casey clients shows a distinctive pattern: the
recurrent appearance of figures linked to organized crime, the world of intelligence,
or both. One client that straddled both worlds was Deak & Co., an international
banking and currency-trading firm run by Nicholas Deak. Deak, much like Casey,
had served in the OSS, and his company maintained a close relationship with the
CIA throughout the post-war epoch. An exposé of Deak & Co. published in the
New Republic in 1976 stated: “Deak is said to have handled CIA funds in 1954

when the agency overthrew Irans Premier Mohammad Mossadegh and restored
the Shah to the throne. During the Vietnam war, Deak & Co. allegedly moved CIA
funds through its Hong Kong office for conversion into piasters in Saigon’s
unofficial market. Deak officials in Hong Kong and Macao helped the CIA
investigate Far East gold smuggling in the mid-1950s.’2

Deak & Co. also had a side that angled toward organized crime. Between
January 1977 and summer 1978, the bank maintained accounts for Isaac Kattan.
Kattan was subsequently identified by authorities as “the biggest drug financier in
South America.” He had worked closely with both the Cali and Medellin cartels
since the 1970s, laundering the illicit profits produced by the lucrative drug trade
through bank accounts in Miami and New York.2" Deak accounts were among
those being used for these purposes, and there is evidence that the firm might have
been aware of what was happening. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit
revealed that Deak employees filed false currency-transaction reports — an anti-
money laundering mechanism that tracked large-sum bank deposits - and
sometimes even neglected to file the reports altogether.“

The Casey client list also included DWG Corp, NVF, and Sharon Steel, a trio of
companies that were under the control of the man who invented the modern
hostile takeover, Victor Posner. “He would spot a company whose assets he judged
were underfunded, gain control, and milk it,” read Posner’s 2002 obituary in The
Economist. “Some bits would be sold off, others would be closed. Previously
unconsidered treasures, such as employees’ pension funds, would be raided and
reinvested in Posner’s other companies,” it added. The three companies
represented by Rogers & Wells reveals the diversity of Posner’s holdings. DWG was
a cigar manufacturer that has since become the Wendy’s fast food chain, and NVF,
formerly National Vulcanized Fiber, was the creator of forbon, a fiber used in guitar
picks. Sharon Steel, meanwhile, had once been a booming industrial firm that had
led the pack in Pennsylvania's steel industry.

Posner’s seemingly innate talent in corporate buccaneering required easy
access to capital. Because of this, by the mid-1970s, he had fallen in with the crowd
around Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert. By the 1980s, he was one of
the Milken’s biggest customers, and it becomes difficult to perceive — at times at
least - where Posner’s interests and Milken’s were separate. Another person in this
circle that was particularly close to Posner was fellow Drexel Burnham Lambert
client Ivan Boesky. Years later, when Boesky was dragged before the courts for his
role in a stock-manipulation fraud case involving the Irish beer giant Guinness,

none other than Max Fisher, whose ties to Leslie Wexner are detailed in Chapter
13, personally intervened on his behalf??? Notably, Clare Hazell, a former
employee of Epstein’s and an alleged key figure in the Epstein-Maxwell sexual
traficking/blackmail operation, married into the wealthy Guinness family in the
early 2000s.728

Much like Robert Vesco, Posner crossed paths with the SEC during Casey’s
time there. The commission had brought a case against the corporate raider,
spearheaded once again by Stanley Sporkin, for “dipping into employees’ pension
plans” at Sharon Steel.2°2 However, the case seemed not to have soured relations
between the SEC veteran and the dispersed gang of corporate raiders. In 1980,
aside from Casey obtaining the Posner corporate accounts at Rogers & Wells’
DWG, Posner’s close friend Meshulam Riklis “worked out the guidelines with the
SEC’s then head of enforcement, Stanley Sporkin ... and proceeded to take [his
company] Rapid-American private” As mentioned in Chapter 2, Rapid-
American included the remnants of Lewis Rosenstiel’s business empire, and Riklis
acquired the Manhattan townhouse that Rosenstiel had bugged for blackmail
purposes.

One close associate of Posner who is worth scrutinizing is the Miami real estate
developer Armer E. White, who had been the finance chairman of the Dade
County Reagan for President campaign in 1980. Casey was, of course, the manager
of the national campaign. It is likely that Posner and White initially encountered
each other when Posner first became interested in Florida land development
through his Security Management Corporation. Beginning in the 1960s, White
was a constant fixture in Posner’s world. Sometime in the 1960s, he became a
director at DWG, and later he was granted a position on the board of Sharon Steel.
By the 1970s, he was listed as a trustee of Posner’s investment trust.

What makes White important, beyond his prominent role within Posner’s
financial network, is the ties he maintained to organized crime. Many of these ties
came through his real estate vehicle, Context Industries, which had benefited from
the Florida land boom in the 1960s. The real estate affairs of the Sunshine State
had, historically, served as an investment outlet for organized crime.
Unsurprisingly, Context soon found itself also swimming in those currents. The
company retained Leonard Pelullo as a “consultant.”24* Pelullo, in turn, was
identified in a New Jersey State Commission of Investigation report as being
closely tied to the Nicodemo Scarfo crime family. Scarfo, allied with the

Philadelphia crime family, had been given control of Atlantic City when it was
something of a backwater. Under his management, it was transformed into the
upper East Coast’s major gambling hub. Donald Trump’s Atlantic City interests
were built, in fact, with concrete supplied by Scarfo’s companies.”

Pelullo seems to have brought the worlds of White and Scarfo together, with
Context Industries making plans for the construction of hotels and casinos in
Atlantic City.” He also served as a source of financing for White’s company:
Context paid the mobster $80,000 to obtain loans that, when they arrived, totaled
around $800,000.72 The source of these loans was Sunshine State Bank, a shady
Florida savings and loan in which Pelullo owned a 6 percent stake.2 The full
extent of Pelullo’s borrowing from the S&L was immense and, upon its collapse, his
outstanding debts were over $12 million. It was not the only financial outfit that
made, ultimately unpaid, loans to Pelullo. Another was Florida’s Great American
Bank. Owned by former US ambassador to Switzerland Marvin Warner, it had
been one of the banks used by the aforementioned Isaac Kattan to launder
Colombian drug money.

An even more direct organized crime connection found in Casey’s client list
was SCA Services, a major waste-management company. While having all the
pretenses of an above-board corporate firm — the SCA's directors and investors
have been some of America’s largest businessmen — the company has been dogged
by repeated scandals, illustrating that its roots have remained squarely planted in
the underworld. One such investor was Anthony Bentrovato, who became a
“substantial SCA stockholder” after selling “a profitable garbage company to SCA
in 1973 for $1.7 million worth of stock.”22 Two years later, Bentrovato was
indicted in a mob-linked conspiracy involving kickbacks from the Teamsters
pension fund. Indicted alongside him was Teamster official Anthony Provenzano —
notable for having been at the center of the initial probe into the disappearance of
Jimmy Hoffa.

The association between a mobbed up waste-management owner like
Bentrovato and a Teamster official like Provenzano is illustrative of the
arrangement between the union and waste management. Waste management in
New Jersey — the center of the SCA complex — fell under the auspices of Teamsters
Local 945. The business agent for this local was Ernest Palmeri, who came “from a
long line of organized crime figures.” Palmeri had been placed in that position by

Genovese capo Peter LaPlaca.*2%

Close to Palmeri was Crescent “Chris” J. Roselle, the general manager of a
family-owned waste-management group that was sold to SCA. Roselle also
operated a series of businesses with Anthony Gaess, the manager of a number of
SCA subsidiaries. Both were involved, for example, with MSLA, a company that
managed a large New Jersey landfill that housed toxic-waste. Linked to MSLA was
“one of the region’s largest waste contractors,” Charles Macaluso. Close to corrupt
Teamsters officials, Macaluso was by no means an ordinary businessman —
according to the New York Times, he had been identified “in a Congressional report
as a ‘soldier’ in the Tieri organized crime ‘family:”2*2 That would be Frank Tieri, a
boss in the Genovese family.

Perhaps fearing that these associations would come to light, SCA attorneys
filed a legal document in 1978 arguing that Gaess was not involved with the
company’s subsidiaries. However, as Alan Block points out in Poisoning for Profit,
the minutes of a corporate board meeting clearly indicate Gaess’ position. It is
notable that this situation occurred during the time when Casey worked with SCA
via Rogers & Wells. The connection to Gaess might have been obscured
temporarily, but the connection between SCA and organized crime was later
dragged into the media limelight in December 1980, when Gaess’ associate
Crescent Roselle was “shot multiple times with both .22 and .32 caliber weapons
outside his company offices in Elizabeth, New Jersey”? This gangland-style
murder occurred less than a week after an FBI informant gave testimony
concerning ties between SCA and the mob.

In May 1981, New Jersey State Police Lt. Col. Justin Dintino testified that the
Genovese and Gambino families exerted extensive influence across the New Jersey
waste-management industry and had significant ties to SCA. When it came to
SCA's president, Thomas Viola, Dintino suggested that he was not a member of
organized crime. He was instead “an associate member of organized crime — a
business associate”? Viola, meanwhile, was quickly prepping for his departure
from SCA, and he opted to hire another familiar face to serve as his lawyer, Joseph
Califano Jr., whose role in Watergate was discussed in the last chapter. The whole
episode makes a brief appearance in Califano’s autobiography:

Though Viola denied any ties of organized crime, an SCA manager had been shot and killed a few
months earlier and the garbage-collection business in New Jersey was suspected of being
infiltrated by the mob. I was negotiating Viola's exit. He wanted me to meet him ... in New York
at the offices of Rogers & Wells, which had been retained to do an independent investigation of
allegations of mob involvement in SCA. I flew to New York for negotiations, which dragged on

into the early evening. Rogers & Wells had found that Viola had no mob connections, had

cleaned up SCA, and removed any employees responsible for misconduct.222

Notably, a very close business associate of Leslie Wexner’s, Frank Walsh of
Walsh Trucking, would later become of interest to law enforcement for his ties to
these same organized crime networks — specifically, the Genovese crime family’s
New Jersey branch. Walsh managed logistics for Wexner’s company The Limited
and, when Walsh was under investigation by the New York Organized Crime Task
Force in 1984, all notices sent to Walsh in connection with that investigation were
addressed to Frank Walsh Financial Resources at One Limited Parkway, Columbus,
Ohio — the same address of Wexner’s The Limited. The Walsh-Wexner relationship
is revisited in greater detail in Chapter 13.

Two final Casey clients worth mentioning are Newfoundland Refining
Company and Shaheen Natural Resources. This pair of firms represented the
interests of John Shaheen, an independent oilman whose long-running association
with Casey dated back to their days together in the OSS. Shaheen’s official bio
states that he had served as “aide to General Donovan, director of the Office of
Strategic Services; Chief, Special Projects Branch in OSS Washington; OSS field
service in European, Mediterranean, and Pacific Theaters”? Richard Harris
Smith, in his history of the OSS, describes Shaheen’s Special Projects Branch as a
“completely autonomous” unit that answered directly to Donovan “outside of the
regular OSS chain of command.”242

Shaheen’s activities brought him very close to the circle of OSS insiders that
Casey had become acquainted with during his time in London. At the end of the
war, for example, Donovan organized a committee to advise Hollywood on the
production of spy-themed movies. The members of this special commission
included David K. E. Bruce, J. Russell Forgan, Allen Dulles, and Shaheen. Their
efforts successfully inserted a score of OSS veterans into the movie business, while
also giving directors and producers a direct link to the inside world of wartime-
intelligence operatives. Hollywood, as a result, became yet another milieu where
the worlds of American intelligence intersected with organized crime.

Close connections to Nixon was something else Casey and Shaheen shared,
with the latter being part of Casey’s “Hardy Boys” clique. Shaheen, like Casey, had
been involved with the Nixon campaigns of the 1960s. When Nixon had briefly
returned to private law practice, Shaheen had been one of his clients. He was
responsible for connecting Nixon with Joey Smallwood, the premier of the

Canadian province of Newfoundland. Smallwood, meanwhile, was engaged in an
effort to industrialize the remote province by courting European and American
capital. Some of the firms he courted bore the unmistakable mark of organized
crime — for example, the controversial John C. Doyle and his company, Canadian

Javelin. Doyle’s company also included a close associate of Edgar Bronfman's,

Mark Millard, as a major investor.! Doyle had also enticed Shaheen, whose
Newfoundland ventures were the two companies taken on by Casey as Rogers &
Wells clients.

The Newfoundland venture was rocky for Shaheen. In 1976, his oil refinery
went bankrupt, setting off a firestorm of legal problems and a domino effect that
soon impacted his other businesses. He desperately tried to raise money from
outside sources, at one point attempting to enlist - with the aid of Casey — the
Kuwaiti National Petroleum Corporation to invest in his Newfoundland oil
company. When that effort failed, Shaheen turned to the open market in a
desperate search for sources of crude petroleum for refining in Newfoundland. It
was then that he made contact with Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer with
close ties to Iran's post-revolution government.

Anyone who has ever looked into the October Surprise plot will instantly
recognize the name Cyrus Hashemi. Indeed, one could argue that the trail of
events that led to that plot began with the encounter between Shaheen and
Hashemi. According to the report prepared by the October Surprise Task Force,
“Hashemi had been identified to Shaheen as someone with good contacts in the oil
communities in Iran, Nigeria, and Tunisia. Following their introduction, Shaheen
solicited Hashemi in securing contracts to purchase crude oil”? The report
continues: “In 1980, Cyrus Hashemi assisted Shaheen in his bid to regain control
of the Newfoundland refinery. According to O. Jackson Cook, an attorney who also
assisted Shaheen in this effort, Hashemi assembled a group of investors who made
money available to Shaheen to bid on the refinery. The FBI’s electronic surveillance
of Cyrus Hashemi confirms that Cyrus and Shaheen were in contact in late 1980
regarding the Newfoundland refinery?

Hashemi also made an appearance in the Carey Energy affair, discussed earlier
in this chapter. Roy Furmark, the “right-hand man” of Shaheen in the
Newfoundland venture and a close associate of William Casey, testified during the
course of the Iran-Contra hearings that he had encountered Hashemi in the

Bahamas on the eve of Charter’s acquisition of BORCO 198.24 According to

Furmark, Hashemi was operating as a “representative of the Iranian government,”
and had been invited to participate in the negotiations by a CIA asset named Roger
Tamraz.* Many of Tamraz’s other activities, including his connections to the
Maxwells, will be discussed in chapter 16

Shortly after Shaheen became acquainted with Hashemi, he began making
overtures to officials in the Carter White House and the CIA concerning schemes
to free the hostages being held in Iran. While the CIA was reportedly uninterested
in what Shaheen had conjured up — which involved a team of “cadres” led by an
exiled Iranian general - the October Surprise Task Force report suggests that
Hashemi was party to the plotting. An FBI report from the period mentions that
“Shaheen stated that he mentioned [Cyrus] Hashemi to persons in the CIA
because ... he determined that Hashemi might be able to play some role in either
alleviating the hostage crises [sic] or in establishing a dialogue with the
[Khomeini] government and the United States.”22°

The Task Force report then adds an ominous detail: “According to [FBI agent
Louis] Stephens, Shaheen indicated during the interview that he mentioned Cyrus
Hashemi to Casey, approximately twice to [William] Casey prior to Ronald
Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981.’224 The significance of this is that Cyrus’
brother, Jamshid Hashemi, claimed that he was visited by William Casey and Roy
Furmark in DC. The purpose of this meeting, he relayed, was to discuss the hostage
crisis in Iran.

The October Surprise Task Force cast doubt on the legitimacy of Jamshid
Hashemi’s claims, citing the lack of independent corroboration. Far more
complicated for the Task Force were the meetings in Madrid in July 1980. As
previously mentioned, the Madrid meetings occurred a month after the fateful Le
Cercle meeting where the Reagan campaign was discussed. With Le Cercle, the
Safari Club, and Shackley’s network all revolving around one another, we are left
with a highly complex picture of elaborate inner power plays.

According to Jamshid, Casey, flanked by Donald Gregg and an unidentified
man, attended two days of meetings with himself, his brother Cyrus, and Iranian
officials in Madrid in late July concerning the hostages. Much of the debate relating
to the October Surprise Task Force revolved around Casey having been in London
for a World War II historical conference on the days when he was alleged to have
been in Madrid. The Task Force noted that there were significant ambiguities in the
conference attendance records, making it hard to know whether Casey could be
consistently accounted for in London.

Madrid is only an hour and half from London by plane, conceivably giving
Casey enough time to move between the cities in a relatively insignificant amount
of time. While the media soundly rejected the possibility that this occurred, a State
Department cable later emerged from this precise time period stating that Casey
had indeed been in Madrid “for purposes unknown”?38 Interestingly, Jamshid
Hashemi claimed to have used a series of aliases, including “Abdula Hashemi,
“Jamshid Khalaj,” and “Jamshid Parsa”?3? Throughout late July and August 1980, a
series of names were logged into the guest records of the Hotel Ritz, where the
meetings with Casey were said to have taken place. These names included
“Abdululi Hashmi,’ “Jamshid Khalaj,’ and “Parsa Jamshid” These individuals
appeared to have checked in and out repeatedly at odd intervals.

There was another name that appeared in the guest records, right alongside the
probable aliases of Jamshid Hashemi. On July 23, a “Robert Gray” checked into the
Hotel Ritz, and on July 25 he checked out.” Was “Robert Gray” actually Robert
Keith Gray? Speculation swirled in the media, as Gray — at the time — was working
on Reagans campaign directly under Casey. The October Surprise Task Force
eventually turned its attention to the possibility. They cleared him because his
passport showed no evidence that he had been in Spain in summer 1980.

Others were not so convinced. Susan ‘Trento, for instance, cites
counterarguments made by former Gray employees that he had multiple passports.
For Gray, a man who had multiple intelligence connections (as detailed in the last
chapter), having multiple passports was hardly out of the question. There were also
eyewitness accounts that suggested that Gray was indeed the “Robert Gray” who
had stayed at the Ritz. According to Susan Trento, “network reporters followed
through by showing a photograph of Gray to people at the hotel, who said they

recognized him?244

ORIGINS OF THE IRAN DEAL

Bu Casey’s appointment as director of Central Intelligence was hardly popular

with many on the Hill and the broader political establishment. One
particularly vehement opponent was Barry Goldwater, whom Casey had sparred
with back in the 1960s. Casey had designated Goldwater as a candidate of an
increasingly incoherent right-wing fringe, and Goldwater clearly held a grudge
against the veteran spook. He proposed his own candidate: Bobby Ray Inman, the

naval intelligence and NSA chief who had done much to disrupt the Shackley
clique by shuttering Task Force 157. Goldwater even went so far as to personally
lobby Reagan to appoint Inman rather than Casey. But he was only successful in
getting Inman the number-two position at the Agency.

The split at the top of the intelligence hierarchy was part of a cascade of
factional struggles that swept across Reagan’s first term as president. Joseph Persico
has described how quickly the CIA bureaucracy was polarized between the two
men, eventually reaching a point where “Casey’s staff and Inman’s staff barely
communicated.’ Inman was blocked from participating in major operations,
such as the early Contra-support operations, and Casey even went so far as to plant
stories about Inman in the press. He devised a new division of labor in the Agency
so that it gave Casey unfettered access to President Reagan - a privilege that Inman
did not enjoy.

Joseph Trento argues, drawing on sources from within the intelligence
community, that the rivalry between the two men was capitalized on by Casey’s
other rival, then vice president George H.W.Bush. Inman, already close to Bush,
acted as his eyes and ears within the CIA. “Bush was walking a tightrope,” Trento
writes. “Inman considered himself a friend of Bush’s and was reporting to Bush on
Casey’s activities within the CIA. At the same time, Inman’s great rival, Shackley,
was [also] reporting to Bush”? To make matters more complicated, Shackley and
his core group of associates — Richard Secord and Thomas Clines, among others —
were increasingly active in Casey’s off-the-books operations, apparently walking a
tightrope of their own between other rival factions.

Details scattered throughout Persico’s biography of Casey add credence to
Trento’s claims. When Inman accepted the CIA job, for example, he wanted Bush
present for the welcoming ceremony. “George Bush isn’t welcome out here,’ Casey
told him, alluding to the CIA. “Inman waited for an explanation, but none was
forthcoming”? At another point, Casey flew into a rage on discovering that
Inman had been frequently meeting with Bush and briefing him on intelligence
matters.

Inman stepped down from his CIA post in 1981 and turned toward a career in
the private sector. The presence of Bush’s influence can be seen in some of his
subsequent business affairs. Inman, in the mid-1980s, worked as the head of an
electronics-industry holding company called Westmark, which in turned owned
Tracor — a major defense contractor that produced electronics for weapons
systems. The main group behind Tracor was a web of in-laws and business

associates of Walter Mischer, the same Texas banker and real estate developer that
Pete Brewton had found to have been involved with Bush in private-intelligence
operations.”

There are other indications that Bush was operating his own intelligence web
within the Reagan administration. Seymour Hersh, for example, charged that Bush,
wary of Casey, set up a “team of military operatives” that “bypassed the national-
security establishment - including the CIA - and wasn't answerable to
congressional oversight 246 According to Hersh, this team included Vice Adm.
Arthur Moreau, then serving as assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Daniel
Murphy, Bush's chief of staff; and Donald Gregg, the former CIA officer who had
become Bush's advisor on national security. Gregg, as discussed earlier, had a
history with Shackley and may have been involved in the October Surprise.
According to Joseph Trento, Gregg served as a channel of communication between
Bush and Shackley.2*4

Such was the reality of the Reagan administration. Despite the outward
appearance of strength and unity, the internal dynamics were characterized by
rivalry, factionalism, double-dealing, and, on occasion, moments of fragile
cooperation. This was the heady environment that incubated the Iran-Contra affair,
in which the US government violated several of its own laws in an attempt to
covertly finance the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight against the country’s
Sandinista government. It was very much the legacy of the Shackley-Wilson
private-intelligence network. Though Ed Wilson was, by this point, in prison for his
Libyan escapades, old veterans of that network such as Clines, Secord, and even
Gray were active in this new covert war.

Oliver North, Secord’s primary partner in orchestrating many of the byzantine
plots that characterized the Contra-support efforts, appears to have been operating
on behalf of Casey, who had been blocked from overtly supporting the Nicaraguan
rebels by Congress. For example, Casey directly intervened to keep North in the
National Security Council when he was supposed to be rotated back to regular
Marine duties. The close proximity of North to Casey adds credence to the
allegations made by Seymour Hersh that Bush’s own intelligence operations had
leaked details to the press concerning North and Secord’s arms sales to Iran.

Shackley himself was called to testify in the wake of the revelations of the
scandal. He was never found to be connected with the affair, though subsequent
statements by investigators suggest that, behind closed doors, there was doubt as to
his professed innocence. The facts that he shared during his testimony were,

however, quite revealing. In the course of his work for John Deuss, Shackley
deployed the services of a former SAVAK agent named Novzar Razmara as a
source of information on Middle East oil and the geopolitical situation
surrounding the Iran-Iraq War. Through Razmara, Shackley was plugged into a
network of former Iranian military officers who maintained some contact with the
country’s post-revolution government.

In November 1984, as the hostage crisis in Lebanon was mobilizing the
National Security Council, Shackley traveled to Hamburg, Germany, with Razmara
to meet with the former SAVAK general Manucher Hashemi (no relation to Cyrus
and Jamshid Hashemi). The ostensible goal of this meeting was to introduce
Shackley and Razmara to “interesting Iranians who were traveling in Europe at the
time and from Iran”*® Present for the meeting was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an
arms dealer and shady businessman with ties to both the older pro-Shah military
officers and the new intelligence apparatus of Khomeini’s government.

There were numerous meetings over the course of that day, and many of the
details about them are redacted in the publicly available version of Shackley’s
deposition. What is revealed is that Ghorbanifar approached Shackley with
questions concerning the acquisition of TOW missiles — anti-tank guided missiles
that the Iranians were seeking in hopes of turning the tide in their conflict with
Iraq. Shackley claims that he rejected Ghorbanifar’s overtures. Yet, TOW missiles
were not the only thing on the arms dealer's mind. Ghorbanifar stated that “for a
price he could arrange for the release of the US hostages in Lebanon through his
Iranian contacts.”2

Shackley’s version of these events is somewhat difficult to believe: the TOW
missiles that would be shipped to Iran were not to be used as a source of financing
for the Contras but were to guarantee that Iran would utilize its influence to release
the hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. One of these hostages was, in fact, a
CIA station head whom Shackley had been close to. These weapons sales were
carried out by individuals all closely associated with Shackley, working in concert
with Ghorbanifar. Yet, somehow we are supposed to believe that Shackley’s 1984
meeting in Hamburg had happened just by chance. Also suspicious was that
Shackley had written a memo on his meeting with Ghorbanifar and dispatched it to
Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters at the State Department.

This memo was brought up during Robert McFarlane’s deposition:

MR. COHEN: You recall that Ted Shackley, back in 1984 sent a memo to Vernon Walters
suggesting we have a new relationship with Iran. Were you aware of that?

MR. MCFARLANE: No, sir.

MR. COHEN: That that recommendation was discarded and that the memo was retyped in June
of 1985, actually June 7 of 1985, it was sort of retyped and given to Michael Ledeen. Are you
aware of that?

Mr. MCFARLANE: No, sir.

Mr. COHEN: That Michael Ledeen gave it to Oliver North?

Mr. MCFARLANE: I didn't know that.

Mr. COHEN: Are you aware of a John Shaheen?

Mr. MCFARLANE: The name is familiar. I believe he was associated with Mr. Khashoggi.

Mr. COHEN: Actually he was a very close friend of Bill Casey’s. They served together in World
War II in the OSS, and John Shaheen floated a possible hostage initiative on behalf of Cyrus
Hashemi ... that proposal was determined by the State Department to be unworthy of pursuit.
Were you aware that was being done at the same time we had paper being prepared by — a
recommendation by John Shaheen?

Mr. MCFARLANE: No sir, I don’t.
Mr. COHEN: Were you aware that the State Department looked behind the Shaheen proposal
and saw Mr. Ghorbanifar?222

Cyrus Hashemi, John Shaheen’s contact who put the October Surprise
conspiracy in motion, was indeed a close associate and business partner of
Manucher Ghorbanifar, and the two would operate in the murky world of arms
trafficking up until Ghorbanifar broke ties with him and partnered instead with
Adnan Khashoggi. According to Gordon Thomas and Matt Dillon, Ghorbanifar
and Robert Maxwell were well acquainted, having been introduced to each other
by Cyrus Hashemi.

Subsequently, both Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar were recruited by Israel to help
traffic arms to Iran to bolster the country in its fight against Iraq, allowing the two
enemies of the Jewish state to continue to weaken each other. Overseeing this
operation was David Kimche, a former Mossad officer and at the time director
general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Robert Maxwell, who was playing a
supporting role in the plan, was also actively working on behalf of Israel
intelligence. As will be detailed in Chapter 9, Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar were also
connected, as was Maxwell, to the PROMIS scandal, also known as the Inslaw
affair.

Shackley might have been privy to these complicated arrangements and
designed his testimony concerning the 1984 Hamburg meeting to suppress
knowledge of his role in them. In his memo, he had effectively offered

Ghorbanifar’s services to the State Department. Former CIA officer William
Corson holds that he did this “because Israeli intelligence suggested it”? This sort
of interplay between Shackley’s network and the other factions detailed in this
chapter with Israeli intelligence would be a recurring theme throughout the Reagan
era and beyond.

Endnotes

20

21
22
23
24

Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of
Containment (South End Press, 1999), 221.

Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, 221.
Yvonne Dilling and Ingrid Rogers, In Search of Refuge (Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1984), 220.

Ken Silverstein and Daniel Burton-Rose, Private Warriors (Verso, 2000), 215-16; Holy Sklar,
Washington's War on Nicaragua (South End Press, 1988), 80.

Joseph John Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private
Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 72,
http://archive.org/details/preludetoterror-r00tren.

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of the Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA (W.
W. Norton), 1987.

Kwitny, Crimes of the Patriots, 59-62.
Kwitny, Crimes of the Patriots, 115.

John Pilger, “The British-American Coup That Ended Australian Independence,’ Guardian,
Oct. 23, 2014.

Joseph Trento, “FBI Probing Ex-Spy’s Role in Task Force,’ Wilmington Sunday News Journal,
October 5, 1980, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP99-
00498R000200010073-2.pdf.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 73.

Peter Maas, Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist (Random House,
1986), 59.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 71.

Maas, Manhunt, 59.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 74.

“Exposing the Libyan Link,’ New York Times Magazine, June 21, 1981.

Maas, Manhunt, 163.

William E. Schmidt, “Ex-Green Beret Is Convicted of Assault on Libyan Student,” New York
Times, December 5, 1981.

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert
Operations of the Reagan Era (South End Press, 1987), 41.

“Theodore Shackley deposition,’ Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the
Iran-Contra Affair, One Hundredth Congress, First session, Washington, 1987, appendix B,

“Shackley deposition,’ 25-28.
“Shackley deposition,’ 14.
Trento, Prelude to Terror, 174.

David Stout, “Theodore Shackley, Enigmatic C.I.A. Official, Dies at 75,” New York Times,
December 14, 2002.

25

26

27

28
29
30

31

32
33
34

35

36
37
38

39
40
41

42
43
44

45

46

47

48

49
50

Philip Taubman, “Ex-C.I.A. Agent’s Associates Run Arms Export Concerns,’ New York Times,
September 6, 1981.

“Pseudonym: Ledbetter, Wallace,” Mary Farrell Foundation,

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the
Earth’s Resources (Oxford University Press, 2021), 89; Fuel for Apartheid: Oil Supplies to South
Africa (Shipping Research Bureau Amsterdam, September 1990).

Susan Mazur, “John Deuss’ Editors on Record on the Man,’ Scoop News, December 2, 2006.
Trento, Prelude to Terror, 230-31.

Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA (S.P.1. Books, 1994),
542.

“Clines Interview,’ Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,
First Session, Washington, 1988, appendix A, Vol. 2, Source Documents, 179,

“Clines Interview,’ 179.
“Clines Interview,’ 179.

Edward T. Pound and Walter S. Mossberg, “Arms Sales to Egypt Yielded Huge Profits for
Obscure New Firm,’ Wall Street Journal, October 1, 1982.

Peter Maas, “Oliver North's Strange Recruits,’ New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1987,
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/18/magazine/oliver-norths-strange-recruits.html.
Taubman, “Ex-C.l.A. Agent’s Associates.”

Taubman, “Ex-C.l.A. Agent’s Associates.”

“Libya: Terrorism II [Terrorism: Libya 09/25/1986-09/30/1986]” Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library Digital Library Collections,
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/digitallibrary/smof/nsc-
politicalandmilitaryaffairs/north/box-105/40-633-1201554-105-022-2017.pdf.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 148.
Trento, Prelude to Terror, 148.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 148-149; David H. Halevy and Neil C. Livingstone, “Noriega’s Pet
Spy,’ Washington Post, January 7, 1990.

Halevy and Livingstone, “Noriega’s Pet Spy.’
Halevy and Livingstone, “Noriega’s Pet Spy.’

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central
America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 73-78.

Morgan Strong, “Mubarak, the Bag Man,’ Consortium News, March 3, 2011,
https://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/030311b.html.

Jon Grambell, “UK Court Orders Gunrunner to Pay over $4.1 Million to UAE Emirate,’ ABC
News, May 22, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uk-court-orders-
gunrunnerpay-41m-uae-emirate-70836616.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 179.

Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.|. Books, December 1992), 201.
Brewton, The Mafia, 201.

Brewton, The Mafia, 201.

51
52
53
54

55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62

63
64
65
66
67
68
69

70
71

72
73

74
75
76
77

78
79

80

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 179.
Jack Anderson, “Did Ex-CIA Agents Bug the Army?,” Washington Whirl, October 18, 1981.
Anderson, “Did Ex-ClA Agents Bug the Army?”

Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and
Loans (Harper Collins, 1991), 119-120; Brewton, The Mafia, 200.

Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 90-91.
Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 91.
Brewton, The Mafia, 160-64.

Brewton, The Mafia, 162.

Brewton, The Mafia, 162.

Brewton, The Mafia, 162.

Brewton, The Mafia, 161.

“Vaughn R. “Bobby” Ross, Sr. Obituary,’ The Advocate, March 5, 2018,
https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/vaughn-ross-obituary?
id=12105551.

James R. Woodrall, Twelve Texas Aggie War Heroes (Texas A & M University Press, 2015), 237.
Brewton, The Mafia, 163.

Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 232.

Brewton, The Mafia, 155-57.

Brewton, The Mafia, 160.

Brewton, The Mafia, 5.

Brewton, The Mafia, 6-7; “Dan Kuykendall Deposition,’ Report of the Congressional
Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, First Session, Washington 1988, appendix B,
Vol. 15, 243-47.

Brewton, The Mafia, 6-7.

“[CTRL] S&L Fraud Suspect Found Dead; Suicide Possible in Corson Case,” July 28, 2001,
https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg73302.html.

Brewton, The Mafia, 104.

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul, 1st Carroll & Graf ed (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 78-79,

Brewton, The Mafia, 105.

Jack Z. Smith, “Fund-raiser faces hard choice in ‘84,’ Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 31, 1983.
Smith, “Fund-raiser faces hard choice in ‘84.’

Rad Sallee and Kristen Mack, “Walter Mischer left mark on politics, real estate,’ Houston
Chronicle, December 20, 2005, https://www.chron.com/news/houston-
deaths/article/Walter-Mischer-left-mark-on-politics-real-estate-1637567.php.

Brewton, The Mafia, 12.

Eric C Orlemann, LeTourneau Earthmovers (MN: MBI, 2001), 124-25; William R Haycraft, Yellow
Steel: The Story of the Earthmoving Equipment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2002), 180.

Van Craddock, “Marathon Manufacturing Co. Sold,” Longview News-Journal, December 20,
1979.

81
82
83
84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

Brewton, The Mafia, 33.

Brewton, The Mafia, 32.

Paul Burka, “Power, Texas Monthly, December 1987, 218.

See, for examples, “Camp Rio Vista Sold to Houston Group,” Kerrville Mountain Sun,
December 16, 1970; “Parker Drilling Firm Re-Elects Chairman,” Abilene Reporter-News,
December 29, 1981.

For a discussion how the Duncans launched Hines’ career, see George Rodrigue, “Anatomy
of a Super Mall,” D Magazine, November 1, 1981,
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1981/november/anatomy-of-a-
super-mall/

“Joseph Patten, 73, Retired in ‘73 as Partner of Bear, Stearns & Co.,” New York Times, April 20,
partner-of-bear-stearns-co.html; “Gulf Chiefs Beaten,’ Spokane Chronicle, June 8, 1982.
Martin Paredes, “Watergate and Mexico,’ El Paso News, May 17, 2017,
https://elpasonews.org/2017/05/17/watergate-and-mexico/; Allen McDuffee, “Shady funds
through foreign powers, digging up dirt, and an election won: the Nixon playbook,’
Timeline, November 16, 2017, https://timeline.com/richard-nixon-election-creep-
c6002789b554.

George Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York:
Scribner, 1999), 82.

The Structure of the U.S. Petroleum Industry: A Summary of Survey Data. United States.
Congress. Senate. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Soecial Subcommittee on
Integrated Oil Operations, 1976, 135.

“New Bank is Headed By Smith,’ Kilgore News Herald, October 3, 1978. Prior to its merger into
Mischer’s complex, one of the Bank of Texas’ directors was Houston oilman Sidney Adger. In
1968, Adger approached Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes - identified above as an
associate of Herman Beebe - about arranging for George W. Bush to enter into the National
Guard as a means of preemptively avoiding the Vietnam War draft. See Jeff Horwitz, “I’m
Very Ashamed,’ Salon, August 28, 2004, https://www.salon.com/2004/08/28/barnes_4/.
“People and Business,’ New York Times, February 23, 1977,

exofficials-of-penn-central.html

Russ Baker, Family of Secrets (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 300,
https://archive.org/details/familyofsecretsb0000bake_ 1716.

Baker, Family of Secrets, 300. Joseph Trento writes that the London merchant bank subsidiary
of First International moved “petrodollars and BCCI money... for a variety of intelligence
operations that would span the next decade, according to the Senate BCCI investigation
and the Morgenthau New York BCCI investigation.” Trento, Prelude to Terror, 139.

Glenn R. Simpson, “Riggs Had Longstanding Link to the CIA,’ Wall Street Journal, December
31, 2004, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB110444413126413199.

“Riggs Bank guilty of money laundering,” NBC News, January 27,2005, https://www.nbc-
news.com/id/wbna6875033.

Kirk Johnson, “Clore Takes Over at Gulf” New York Times, June 9, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/09/business/clore-stock-takes-over-at-gulf.html. During
the takeover, Clore retained the legal services of the New York City attorney Kenneth Bialkin.

97

98
99

100

101

102

103
104
105
106
107

108
109
110

111
112

113

114

115

116

Bialkin, whose law firm Wilkie Farr & Gallagher saw charges brought against some of its
members in connection to Robert Vesco’s looting of IOS, was at this time the chairman of
the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Interestingly, Robert Allen, who was ousted from
control of Gulf Resources in the Clore takeover, was a recipient of the ADL's Torch of Liberty
Award. See “Robert H. Allen: Business and Professional Background,’

book-full/msa3-1-1996.pdf.

On John Murchison and his ties to First International and LTV, see “Briefs,” Scouting,
January/February 1979, 4. On Edwin L. Cox and his ties to First International and LTV, see
Harry Hurt Ill, “The Most Powerful Texans,’ Texas Monthly, April 1976, 114.

“Post Edges Back Into LTV’s Leadership Ranks,’ Bradenton Herald, June 14, 1970.

Robert E. Bedingfield, “Personality,’ New York Times, May 24, 1970,

seen.html.

Howard D. Putnam and Gene Busnar, The Winds of Turbulence: A CEO's Reflections on Surviving
and Thriving on the Cutting Edge of Corporate Crisis (Howard D. Putnam Enterprise, 1995),
184.

Robert O. Anderson was at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1974 to 1980, while
George H.W. Bush was there 1977-1979.

“Governor Tours Oil Drilling Site,’ Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, May 2, 1967; “Airline Puts Sleek
New Charter Plane to Work,’ Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, November 9, 1967.

Baker, Family of Secrets, 320.

Baker, Family of Secrets, 321.

“State Secrets,” Texas Monthly, July 1984, 196.

“All's Well That Ends Well,” The Observer, May 23, 1993.

Andre Adelson, “Legendary Oilman Has a New Venture,’ New York Times, July 31, 1987,

new-venture.html

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 102-6.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 102.

See Mohammed Heikal, Iran: The Untold Story - An Insider’s Account of America’s Iranian
Adventure and Its Consequences for the Future (Pantheon Books, 1982).

Heikal, Iran: The Untold Story, 124.

Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and
Loans, 1st Harper Perennial ed (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991), 461.

“Fit for a Saudi”, Philadelphia Daily News, October 12, 1977.

“RE: Alex Gus,’ FBI Airtel from Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles, to FBI Director, February
9, 1961, NARA Record number 124-10199-10054,
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docld=142286.

Robert C. Ruark, “Here’s How Ray Ryan of Evansville Happened to Buy Hotel Kenya,’
Evansville Press, September 26, 1959.

Ricardo Sicre was a participant in a special OSS unit nicknamed the “Banana Boys,’ which
carried out activities in Spain and Morocco. See Patrick K. O'Connell, Operatives, Spies, and
Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS (Free Press, 2014),

117

118
119
120

121
122
123

124

125

126
127

128
129
130
131

132
133

134

135
136
137

138

27, 30, 43; Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-41 (Yale University
Press, 1996), 177. Overseeing the OSS Secret Intelligence apparatus, which handled ‘cloak
and dagger’ operations, in Spain was Frank Ryan. See, George C. Chalou (eds.), The Secrets
War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II (National Archives Trust Fund Board, 1992),
127.

On the World Commerce Corporation, see Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan: The Last
Hero (Times Books, 1982), 795-800; Major Ralph Ganis, The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the
Plot to Kill JFK, ePub (Hot Books, 2020), 293-300; S. William Snider, A Special Relationship:
Trump, Epstein, and the Secret History of the Anglo-American Establishment (Independent,
2020), 97-150; Larry Loftis, The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffith,
Countess of the Romanones (Atria Books, 2021), 222, 266.

Snider, A Special Relationship, 97-150.
Brown, Wild Bill Donovan, 795-800; Ganis, The Skorzeny Papers, 293-300.

Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi (Grand Central
Publishing, 1986), 204.

Kessler, Adnan Khashoggi, 203.
Kessler, Adnan Khashoggi, 302.

“Memorandum for the Record, Subject: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,’ CIA,
April 25, 1967, NARA Record Number 104-10213-10101,

safari-club/.

“Edward Moss’ Mafia Connections,’ CIA Memo, May 14, 1973, NARA Record Number 104-
101119-10406, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docld=14916,

“Edward Moss’ Mafia Connections.”

Peter Dale Scott, “The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing,”
Asia-Pacific Journal, April 6, 2014, https://apjjf.org/2014/12/10/Peter-Dale-
Scott/4090/article.html

Scott, “American Deep State.”
“Edward Moss’ Mafia Connections”
Trento, Prelude to Terrror, 169.

David Teacher, Rogue Agents: The Cercle and 6l in the Private Cold War 1951-19917 (5th ed.,
2017), 192.

Teacher, Rogue Agents, 189, 467.

Joseph Persico, Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey from the OSS to the CIA (Viking,
1990), 42.

Persico, Casey, 84-85; “Otto Doering, Former O.S.S. Leader,” New York Times, July 14, 1979,
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/14/archives/otto-doering-former-oss-leader.html.

Persico, Casey, 61.
Persico, Casey, 61.

Teacher, Rogue Agents, 35-36. Teacher notes that the Institute for American Strategy had
been organized by the American Security Council.

Teacher, Rogue Agents, 546.

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140

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142

143
144
145
146

147
148

149

150

151

152
153

154

155
156

157

158

159

160

161

162

Persico, Casey, 114.

Stu Bishop, “Stans: He Fixed the Books,’ North American Congress on Latin America,
September 25, 2007, https://nacla.org/article/stans-he-fixed-books.

Persico, Casey, 131.

Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America: The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York:
Morrow, 1978), 222.

Hougan, Spooks, 169.

R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (Linden, 1987), 19.

Naylor, Hot Money, 26-30.

Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money
Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Prager, 2004), 36.

Block and Weaver, Clouded by Desire, 36.

Arthur Herzog, Vesco: From Wall Street to Castro’s Cuba - The Rise, Fall, and Exile of the King of
White Collar Crime (Doubleday, 1987), 11-15.

“Israeli Corporation-Rosenbaum-International Credit Bank Controversy,’ US State
Department cable, September 30,1974,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974TELAV05552_b.html.

Herzog, Vesco, 30-31.

Hougan, Spooks, 176-77.

Robert Hutchinson, Vesco (Avon, 1976), 241.

Dan Dorfman, “Casey Misled Investors on Agribusiness, Judge Rules,’ July 15, 1981, Chicago
Tribune.

Dorfman, “Casey Misled Investors”; In the Matter of Multiponics, Incorporated, Bankrupt.
machinery Rental, Inc. and Carl Biehl, Appellants, v. William W. Herpel, Trustee, et al., Appellees,
622 F.2d 709 (5th Cir. 1980).

Hutchinson, Vesco, 235.

Gary Miller and Andrew Whitford, Above Politics: Bureaucratic Discretion and Credible
Commitment, 165; Alan A. Block and Patricia Klausner, “Masters of Paradise Island: Organized
Crime, Neo-Colonialism, and the Bahamas,’ Dialectical Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1987): 85-102,
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00734790.

Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories Press,
2014), 303-5.

“Allegations of Connections Between Cia and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the
United States, Volume Il: The Contra Story,” Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General,
Report of Investigation, October 8, 1998,

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central
America (University of California Press, 1998), 95.

“Drug Trafficker Links Fugitive to Laundering,’ Baltimore Sun, November 26, 1991,
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-11-27-1991331037-story.html.

Godfrey Sperling Jr, “Billygate’ Stands in Way of Comeback for President,’ Christian Science
Monitor, July 28, 1980, https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0728/072837.html.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya: Report Together with Additional Views, US
Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session, October 2, 1980, 1-2,

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166
167
168
169

170

171

172
173

174
175
176

Wes

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179

180
181
182
183
184

185

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/961015.pdf.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 2.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 7.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 11.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 11, note 35.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 160.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 161.

Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South: Stars of the New Confederacy (New York:
Grossman, 1968), 146.

Gerard Colby, Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, ePub (Open Road Media, 2014),
782.

Hearing Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Eighty-
Eighth Congress, June 11, 1964, 188,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings Reports and Prints of the Senat/9Tc4
AAAAIAAJ.

Hearing Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, 188.

Elizabeth Hedderigg, “Nix Hints Charter Plays Major Role in Bankshares’, Tampa Bay Times,
February 18, 1970.

Colby, DuPont Dynasty, 796.

Herzog, Vesco, 143.

Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer (Random House, 1996),
23.

Alan A. Block and Constance Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money
Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Praeger, 2004), 20.

Black and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 20.

Investigation of Robert L. Vesco Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Improvements in Judicial
Machinery of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-sixth Congress,
Second Session, October 2, 3, 23, 24, December 2, and 3, 1980, 237,
https://books.google.com/books/about/Investigation_of Robert L Vesco.html?
id=wHFAmuZlAqcC.

Investigation of Robert L. Vesco, 237.

Investigation of Robert L. Vesco, 238.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 13.

Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya, 11, note 37.

“Inquiry is Reported on Libya Plane Sale,” New York Times, September 30, 1979,

vesco-and-democratic.html; Yousseff M. Ibrahin, “U.S. Delays Sales Made to Libyans,’ New
York Times, June 24, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/24/archives/us-delays-sales-
made-to-libyans-curbs-on-others-studied-in-drive-on.html

The Undercover Investigation of Robert L. Vesco’s Alleged Attempts to Reverse a State
Department Ban Preventing the Export of Planes to Libya, Staff Report of the Committee on
the Judiciary, United States Senate, September 1982, 6,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The Undercover Investigation of Robert L/42esl
xxc8RcC.

186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194

195

196

197

198
199
200

201

202
203

The Undercover Investigation, 4.

Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, 50-53, 75.

The Undercover Investigation, 4.

The Undercover Investigation, 11.

The Undercover Investigation, 8-9.

The Undercover Investigation, 35.

The Undercover Investigation, 35.

The Undercover Investigation, 60.

Morton Minz, “Truth is Elusive in ‘Plot’ to Gain Release of C130s," Washington Post, August
plot-to-gain-release-of-c130s/698dfd4a-00e8-4f9 1-926d-489dc9fc72e1/.

David Brewerton, “Jack Dellal Obituary,’ The Guardian, November 8, 2012,

Nicholas Faith, “Obituary: Sir Edward du Cann, ex-politician and financier who helped elect
Margaret Thatcher,’ Independent, September 8, 2017,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-edward-du-cann-tory-conservative-
politician-financier-oily-margaret-thatcher-1922-committee-city-life-insurance-
a7933726.html.

“Letter from Mr Mohamed Al-Fayed to The Rt Hon Paul Channon, MP Secretary of State for
Trade and Industry,’ Select Committee on Standards and Privileges First Report, UK
Parliament, February 1987,

“Letter from Mr Mohamed Al-Fayed.”

“AFC on Charter Co's list of creditors,” Cincinnati Post, April 23, 1984.

“Max M. Fisher: In Ronald Reagan's White House,’ https://maxmfisher.org/resource-
center/photo/ronald-reagans-white-house.

Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton, Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the Top One Hundred
Officials (Presidential Accountability Group, January 1982), 630-32.

Persico, Casey, 166.

Tad Szulc, “Deak & Co. Cited,’ New Republic, April 2, 1976, https://archive.org/details/nsia-
DeakNicholas/nsia-DeakNicholas/Deak%20Nicholas%2005/. Nicholas Deak died under
strange circumstances on November 19, 1985. He was shot to death at the Deak corporate
offices in lower Manhattan. The gunman was a homeless woman named Lois Lang, who had
arrived at the building earlier that day “asserting that she was part owner of the company
and that ‘an injustice had been done to her.” Also killed by Lang was receptionist Frances
Lauder (Margot Hornblower, “Deak-Perera Chairman Fatally Shot in Office,’ New York Times,

perera-chairman-fatally-shot-in-office/c9133e93-e2e1-446d-8989-41ca8d7beed1/). It was
subsequently reported that Lang was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and had
“believed the government had given her Deak-Perera in the 1940s.... When Deak & Co. filed
for protection under federal bankruptcy laws last year, Lang became convinced that
[Nicholas Deak] had mismanaged the firm, and decided to kill him.” (Rick Hampson,
“Woman Diagnosed as Paranoid and Schizophrenic, Psychiatric Report Says,’ AP News,
November 21, 1985, https://apnews.com/article/911643acc47ca5b4ce77f8ac9a11c451).

Hank Albarelli notes: “Deak’s killer, Lois Lang, as early as 1975, was confined to the Santa

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205

206

207

208

209

210

211
212
213

214

Clara Valley Medical Center under the care of the late Dr. Frederick Melges, a psychiatrist
associated with the Stanford Research Institute, a longtime facility used by the CIA and US
Army for behavior modification experiments.... According to numerous medical journal
articles written by Dr. Megles, his specialty was narco-hypnosis and the use of hypnosis to
create dissociative states. Dr. Melges worked closely at Stanford with Dr. Leo Hollister, also
deceased, who had been a CIA MK/ULTRA sub-contractor working with LSD and other
drugs” [H. P. Albarelli, A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in
the JFK Assassination (Trine Day, 2013)].

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 82.

“The Cash Connection: Organized Crime, Financial Institutions, and Money Laundering,’
President’s Commission on Organized Crime, US Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs, 1984, 42.

“Victor Posner obituary,’ Economist, March 7, 2002,
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2002/03/07/victor-posner,

“Letter from Max Fisher to Judge Morris Lasky on Behalf of Ivan Boesky,” Securities and
Exchange Commission Historical Society, September 28, 1987, http://www.sechistorical.org.
Richard Eden, “Countess of lveagh, 46, Splits from £900m Guinness Heir,’ Mail Online,
February 27, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9306473/Countess-lveagh-
splits-Guinness-heir-one-Britains-biggest-divorces.html.

“Interview with Stanley Sporkin,’ Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society,
September 2003, http://3197d6d14b5f1 9f2f440-
5e13d29c4c016cf96cbbfd197c579b45.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/collection/oral-
histories/sporkin092303Transcript.pdf.

Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk
Bond Raiders (New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1989), 58. Incredibly, Riklis had his own
encounters with Robert Vesco and IOS. In 1971 it was reported that he offered $10 million to
a “dissident” group of IOS shareholders loyal to Cornfeld. There might be a simple
explanation for this apparent factional disput. Cornfeld had pressured Riklis to purchase,
through Rapid American, “450,000 shares [of IOS] at $4 a piece”; it was suggested by those
close to the fight that he wanted, with the $10 million commitment, “to be taken out of his
stock position at cost, at which point he would drop the dissidents and step aside.’ See
“1.0.S. Managers Score Riklis on Rebel Move,’ New York Times, August 19, 1971; and
Hutchison, Vesco, 174.

Rebecca Thom, “2 Elected in Palm Beach; 2 in Run-off,’ Sun-Sentinel, February 3, 1988.
Brewton, The Mafia, 321.

According to Walter Beinecke Jr., White had been “manager or junior partner for [the]
Mackle brothers.’ See “Interview with Walter Breinecke Jr., Samuel Proctor Oral History
Project,” University of Florida, July 9, 1990, 129, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00006970/00001/.
The Mackle brothers were behind the General Development Corporation, the major land
development corporation that helped develop Florida hotspots such as Key Biscayne,
Deltona, and Port St. John. Another figure in the General Development Corporation was Lou
Chesler, the Canadian-born mobster who acted as a front man for Meyer Lansky.

Susan Sachs, “Pelullo, Sunshine State Bank had most dealings,” Miami Herald, October 9,
1986; On the Mackle Brothers, General Development Corporation, and Lou Chesler, see
“General Development Corp,’ Mackle Brothers website,

215

216

217

218
219

220

221

222

223

224
225

226

Lansky, see Jim Hougan, Spooks, 230-231.

Rick Green, “State Reinstated Boxing Promoter,’ Hartford Courant, October 28, 2004,
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2004-10-28-0410280032-story.html.
Chris Frates, “Donald Trump and the Mob,’ CNN, July 31, 2015,
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/31/politics/trump-mob-mafia/.

“Context in Accord for Casino Project,’ New York Times, June 8, 1979,

The project was eventually abandoned.

Susan Sans, “Pelullo, Sunshine State Bank Had Most Dealings,” Miami Herald, Oct. 4, 1986.
Pelullo’s stake in Sunshine was organized through King Crown, a company that he had
cofounded with the thrift’s primary owner, Ray Corona. Corona’s background may be
relevant here: he had cut his teeth in the world of shadowy finance at Miami National Bank.
This bank, in the late 1950s, had been bought by Louis Poller, a close associate of Sam
Cohen, a veteran of the Detroit Pur- ple Gang and ally of Meyer Lansky. Poller’s purchase of
Miami National was carried out with the aid of a loan from the Teamsters Pension Fund:
“Shortly thereafter, a coterie of Hoffa-Teamsters associates became directors of the bank,
and loans became available for numerous mob-connected ventures” See: “Subject: Joseph
Shimon,’ FBI, November 3, 1962, 34, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?
docld=116372; “Organized Crime: Stolen Securities” Senate Subcommittee on Government
Operations, 1971, 708; Jeff Gerth, “Richard M. Nixon and Organized Crime,” Penthouse, July
1974). Miami National also boasted a curious choice for legal counsel: the law firm of
Helliwell, Melrose and DeWolf. This was the firm of OSS veteran and CIA banker Paul
Helliwell, but work for the bank fell to Helliwell’s associate Truman Skinner. Peter Brewton
notes that Skinner frequently worked with Donald Berg - a business associate of Richard
Nixon's good friend Bebe Rebozo - and Harold White in a series of Florida real estate
ventures. Harold White, to bring this full circle, was the son of Pelullo’s good friend Armer
White. (Brewton p. 322-23)..

Alan A. Block and Frank R. Scarpitti, Poisoning for Profit: The Mafia and Toxic Waste in America
(William Morrow & Co., 1985), 172.

“Provenzano and 2 Other Temaster Aides Indicted for Kickback Deal,’ New York Times,
December 11, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/1 1/archives/provenzano-and-2-
other-teamster-aides-indicted-for-kickback-deal.html.

William M. Adler, Mollie’s Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line (Scribner,
2000), 226; Organized Crime Links to the Waste Disposal Industry: Hearings Before the House
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs, May 28, 1981, 17-24, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?
id=2TYhAAAAMAAJ.

Ralph Blumenthal, “Illegal Dumping of Toxins Laid to Organized Crime,” New York Times,
June 5, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/nyregion/illegal-dumping-of-toxins-
laid-to-organized-crime.html.

Block and Scarpitti, Poisoning for Profit, 176.

Hazardous Waste Enforcement: Report of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of
the Committee on Energy and Commerce, US House of Representatives, December 1982, 22.

Hazardous Waste Enforcement, 24.

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228

229

230

231

232

233
234

235
236
237
238

239
240
241

242
243
244
245

Joseph A. Califano Jr., Inside: A Public and Private Life (Public Affairs, 2004), 391.

Nominations to the US Advisory Commission on Information: Hearings, Ninety-Second
Congress, First Session, April 29 and June 8, 1971, 33,
https://books.google.com/books/about/Nominations to the U S Advisory Commissi.htm
I?id=t9cRAAAAIAAJ

Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency
(Lyons Press, 2019), xiv.

See Walter Stewart, “John Doyle’s Gamble with Millions: Heads He Wings, Tails You Lose,’
Macleans, February 1, 1969.

Mark Millard was director of Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co. when it held over 28,000 shares in
Canadian Javelin, while Millard himself held 1,000 shares in Doyle’s company. See “Company
officials report stock changes,’ National Post (Toronto), October 27, 1962. Edgar Bronfman, in
his book Good Spirits, refers to Mark Millard as “my friend” and as “a senior executive at Carl
M. Loeb, Rhoades & Company and my father-in-law John L. Loeb’s partner”. He goes on to
say of Millar “I had enjoyed many successful business dealings with Mark over the years, and
| trusted him deeply.” See Edgar Bronfman, “Good Spirits: The Making of a Businessman,’
New York Times, 1998,

Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations concerning the Holding of
American Hostages by Iran in 1980, US Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, One
Hundred Second Congress, Second Session, January 3, 1993, 120,
https://books.google.com/books?id=x-pl1AAAAMAAJ.

Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations, 120-21.

Deposition of Roy Furmark,’ Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-
Contra Affair, Appendix B, Vol. 11: Depositions, 100 Congress, First Session, 1988, 19
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docld=146481#relPageld=43

“Deposition of Roy Furmark,’ 19

Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations, 121.

Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations, 122.

Robert Perry, “Debunking the Debunkers of October Surprise” (Excerpt from America’s Stolen
Narrative), FAIR, March 2013, https://fair.org/extra/debunking-the-debunkers-of-october-
surprise/.

Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations, 74.

Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations, 130.

Susan Trento, The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Influence and Access in
Washington (St. Martins, 1992), 129. https://archive.org/details/powerhouserobert0Otren
Persico, Casey, 233.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 216.

Persico, Casey, 232.

Brewton, The Mafia, 7. To make things more complicated, Tracor was in 1985 involved in a
joint venture to produce and install hush kits for Boeing 707s. Customers of these particular
hush kits included Buffalo Airways, one of the successors to Global International Airways
formed by Farhad Azima. See Brewton, The Mafia, 318.

246

247
248
249

250

251
252

Seymour M. Hersh, “The Vice President's Men,” London Review of Books, Vol. 41, no. 2, January

men.
Trento, Prelude to Terror, 214.

“Shackley deposition,’ 144.

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Vol. 1, 164,
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docld=146504.

Joint Hearings Before the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with
Iran and Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan
Opposition: Testimony of Robert C. McFarlane, Gaston J. Sigur, Jr, and Robert W. Owen, One
Hundredth Congress, First Session, May 11, 12, 13, 14, and 19, 1987, p. 244,
https://archive.org/details/lran-Contra-HearingsTestimonyTranscripts/1987-irn-0003-
McFarlane-Sigur-Owen/.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 145.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 284.

CHAPTER7

A KILLER ENTERPRISE

OUTLAW BANKS

W: must learn to ‘feel’ that BCCI is this Power,’ read a bizarre memo once

circulated by the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, better
known as BCCI. That “power” was a reference to the image printed in light tones
behind the text — a print of Michelangelo’s famous Creation of Adam, the fresco
painting that adorns the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It shows God, surrounded
by angels and with his finger outstretched, reaching toward the first man, Adam,
imbuing him with the gift of life. In continuing the reference to Michelangelo's
depiction of the divine spark, the memo stated that BCCI is “not merely a group
of branches, a set of facts and figures. Since, BCCI is a power, a spirit, a Desire — it
is all encompassing and enfolding — it relates itself to cosmic power and wisdom,
which is the will of God.”

Founded in 1972, BCCI certainly wielded considerable power in its day,
though its power was hardly of a spiritual or benevolent variety. When it finally
collapsed after a nearly two-decades run, thanks to forced closures brought about
by regulators and law enforcement, so too did the “planetary Ponzi scheme’ it had
been running.* At the time of its collapse in 1991, TIME ran a lengthy story
describing the bank as the “dirtiest bank of them all”? The authors of that article,
Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, also wrote that Robert Morgenthau,
Manhattan's district attorney, had stated that he received no help from the Justice
Department when he launched his own investigation into the bank.

Obfuscation and protection from the highest levels of power were defining
characteristics of BCCI. The bank’s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, who had a
penchant for occult ramblings and mind games, surrounded himself with a bevy of
politicians, community leaders, business giants, powerful criminals, and spooks.*
Prior to the formation of BCCI, Abedi, a Pakistani banker, had been an economic

advisor to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Sheikh Zayed had been the driving
force behind the formation of the United Arab Emirates and was the unions first
leader. According to one person close to Abedi, he had been the one who had first
planted the idea of what would become the UAE in Sheikh Zayed’s mind.

Abedi was something of a cosmopolitan, an internationalist, and an opponent
of classical colonialism in the developing world. At the same time, he opposed
socialist currents sweeping across the Middle East and elsewhere. A self-described
liberal, he first conceived of BCCI as a “world bank, a global bank for the third
world.”° With backing from Sheikh Zayed, the Saudi royal family, and probably
the Saudi intelligence service, what developed was something else entirely. BCCI’s
expertise was in money laundering, capital flight, fraud, and much, much worse.

While the conventional narrative presents BCCI as an enterprise whose
origins lay in Pakistani-Saudi networks of power, influence, and finance, there have
also been allegations that the bank’s origins also involved the CIA. A 1992 report
published in Newsweek cites an anonymous former officer of BCCI and its
predecessor, United Bank, as well as a close associate of Abedi’s, who asserted that
Abedi “had worked with the CIA during his United Bank days and that the CIA
had encouraged him in his project to launch BCCI, since the agency realized that
an international bank could provide valuable cover for intelligence operations”?
This same source specifically mentioned Richard Helms, CIA director from 1966
until 1973, as having been involved in the bank’s creation. He told Newsweek,
“What I have been told is that it wasn’t a Pakistani bank at all. The guys behind the
bank weren’t Pakistani at all. The whole thing was a front.”8

According to Beaty and Gwynne, the bank’s organizational structure was
divided between two very different worlds. On the front-facing side, “more
conventional departments of [BCCI] handled such services as laundering money
for the drug trade and helping dictators loot their national treasuries.” On the back
end, meanwhile, was something that was called the “black network,” which
reportedly continued after the demise of the bank. This black network “operates a
lucrative arms-trade business and transports drugs and gold,’ engages in sex
trafficking and maybe even murder-for-hire. In some cases, it even helps shape the
military capacities of entire nations.2

Thus, BCCI supported the work of A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist
and engineer known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. This
work had begun after India tested the “Smiling Buddha,’ their own nuclear

weapon, in 1974 and it was carried out under the auspices of Khan Research
Laboratories. The clandestine laboratory operated several front groups, one of
which was the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and
Technology. A “philanthropic” arm of BCCI, the BCCI Foundation, provided
funding for this institute.+?

According to Beaty and Gwynne, BCCI obtained, on behalf of Pakistan and
Iraq, an experimental weapon called a “Columbine head” Columbine heads
were allegedly a type of thermobaric bomb, better known as a “fuel air explosive,”
as they suck in the surrounding air to create a powerful explosion.

It was not all bombs, however, when it came to BCCI’s activities in Abedi’s
home country. The bank also played an important role in tightening relations
between Pakistan and states in the Persian Gulf. The economic development of
Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi had been built on the massive flow of cheap labor
from Pakistan. There was a reciprocal flow of money from those states back to
Pakistan through migrant remittances, that is, money sent by laborers to their
families at home.

In the developing world, remittances are often a complicated issue, with the
lack of strong banking sectors and financial regulations resulting in everything
from overcharging for financial transactions to outright theft. BCCI stepped into
this world and soon made itself the primary conduit for the flow of such money. It
was a win-win for all parties: the functioning of this system solidified the use of
Pakistani labor by states in the Persian Gulf, while Pakistan received in-flows of
foreign currencies. It was good for BCCI, too: the remittance float was registered
on BCCI’ balance sheets, allowing the bank to appear far more cash-rich than it
really was./2

Other services that BCCI provided for the Arab ruling families included the
procurement of “Pakistani prostitutes ... typically teenage girls, known as ‘singing
and dancing girls’”!“ When discussing these types of activities, the Congressional
report on BCCI came close to revealing the bank/black network dichotomy
discussed by Beaty and Gwynne in TIME. The head of BCCI’s Pakistan
operations was a close friend of Abedi named Sani Ahmad. Nazir Chinoy, BCCI’s
general manager for France and Africa, told investigators that “Sani was the
trusted man for things no one else was supposed to know. We were the
technocrats. Sani Ahmed would handle the things we wouldn't, like get girls. If

anyone paid anyone any money [as a bribe], Sani would have been the one to do
it.’* BCCI’ role in sex trafficking, including of minors, is discussed in chapter 11.

Early on, BCCI saw a pipeline into the US financial system as being necessary
to its success. The earliest attempts to cement this connection saw Abedi court
American Express. This plan was abandoned when American Express demanded
significant influence over BCCI’s internal activities. Abedi then pivoted toward
Bank of America, one of the largest American banks that, since the 1960s, had
been active in the Eurodollar trade. Bank of America became a large stakeholder in
BCCI, holding some 30 percent of the stock, and a number of the bank’s officials
joined the BCCI board.

Bank of America later sold that 30 percent, expressing concern over BCCI's
activities. It looked like Bank of America was engaging in due diligence, but
appearances were deceiving. As the Congressional BCCI report pointed out, Bank
of America “would in fact retain correspondent banking relations with BCCI,
continually seek additional business from BCCI, collude in least one of BCCI's
purchase of foreign banks through nominees in South America, and earn a great
deal of money from the relationship until BCCI’s closure.”+®

Ultimately, Bank of America’s sale of the shares simply allowed BCCI to
further develop its complicated web of front companies, proxies, and offshore
entities that it used to mask its activities. The bank turned to ICIC (Overseas)
Limited, set up in the Caymans by BCCI, to act as a clearinghouse to sell shares of
BCCI subsidiaries.1®

Beyond their relationship with Bank of America, BCCI’s major penetration of
the US financial system came through the bank’s involvement with Bert Lance, a
prominent banker from Atlanta and a close friend of Jimmy Carter. He served as
an advisor to Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and was subsequently named
director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). However, Lance was
soon forced from his post under the cloud of scandal. In the words of the
Congressional BCCI report, “By September 21, 1977, when Bert Lance tendered
his resignation from the position of director of the [OMB] to President Jimmy
Carter, Lance had become the most notorious banker in the United States” +

Lance's notoriety was directly related to the National Bank of Georgia, of
which Lance had become president in 1975. His time there was marred by
controversy. For instance, he had particularly tense relations with the bank's
parent company, Financial General Bankshares (FGB), “for making loans which

both exceeded his lending limit and were not secured by collateral”18 These
activities, as well as similar ones that Lance had carried out at other banks,
haunted him during his time at the OMB, particularly when Carter asked
Congress “to suspend ethics rules that would have forced Lance to sell 190,000
shares of stock he owned in National Bank of Georgia. He based his request on the
ground that Lance would lose $1.6 million if he was forced to sell, because the
bank’s stock was depressed}? His request instead resulted in a sweeping
investigation into Lance’s banking practices.

Lance was also violating regulations by engaging in other financial activities
while serving in public office. FGB’s major stockholder and controller, Gen.
George Olmsted, was under orders from the Federal Reserve to unload his stock
due to laws governing holding companies. He approached Lance for help, and
Lance began the hunt for buyers for their holdings in FGB and National Bank of
Georgia.

Olmsted is an intriguing figure, and his history in banking might shed some
light on why FGB was such a hot commodity in the 1970s. During World War II,
Olmsted wore many hats, with involvement in everything from managing lend-
lease arrangements to working in intelligence in the China-Burma-India theater.
After the war, he took control of International Bank in Washington, DC, and built
a business empire with extensive holdings in other banks, real estate, and
insurance companies. It was through International Bank that he bought his
controlling stake in FGB. Another major International Bank holding was the
Cayman Islands-based Mercantile Bank & Trust. Mercantile was one of the many
banks that composed Paul Helliwell’s dark money network, and it owned a stake
in his Castle Bank & Trust.22

During his last days as director of OMB, Lance put Olmsted in touch with J.
Middendorf, who had served as Secretary of the Navy and as ambassador to the
Netherlands under President Nixon. Middendorf was also close to Carter, who
had offered to retain him as Navy Secretary. Middendorf opted instead for a career
in the private sector. He was immediately intrigued by Lance's plan, and the
“Middendorf Group” was put together to take over FGB.

The Middendorf Group consisted of prominent business figures like Jackson
Stephens, the Arkansas kingmaker behind Stephens, Inc.; the banker Jorge
Pereira; and Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum. Stephens, discussed in
greater detail in the next chapter, was particularly important to the whole chain of

events involving FGB and its takeover by BCCI. He had known Lance since at
least 1975, likely through their mutual support for Jimmy Carter, whom Stephens
had allegedly known since their days at the Naval Academy. Stephens and Lance
continued to work together on selling-off FGB even after the Middendorf Group
fell apart. Reportedly, Stephens was involved in the bank's convoluted affairs
because he “wanted FGB to use a company he controlled, Systematics Inc., for its
data processing business?%

Other prospective buyers had different motives. Armand Hammer, for
example, saw a gold mine of valuable information that could be leveraged for
political and economic gain. FGB “had outstanding loans to more than one
hundred US senators and congressmen.... Hammer explained that all these
congressional borrowers had submitted statements to the bank that revealed their
precise financial status, including their debts, earnings, real estate holdings, other
assets.... Hammer had blackmail in mind”? As will be mentioned in Chapter 9,
Hammer's father had been a spy for Soviet intelligence, and suspicions that he too
had a relationship with the security-intelligence apparatus of the USSR dogged
Armand Hammer for years. This makes his interest in using FGB for the “financial
blackmail” of American senators and congressmen particularly significant.

However, Hammer eventually abandoned his takeover scheme and sold off his
shares to BCCI frontmen. It is possible that his encounter with the bank was not a
one-off event, however, as throughout the 1970s, roughly one million shares in
Hammer's Occidental Petroleum were held by one of BCCI’s agents, Ghaith
Pharaon. In a New York Times blurb on the arrangement, Pharaon was described as
Occidental’s representative in Saudi Arabia.” Later, Occidental partnered with
the London-based Attock Oil Co. Ltd., which was led by a handful of BCCI
players. These included Pharaon and Kamal Adham, the former Saudi intelligence
chief and co-founder of the Safari Club.”

BCCI came to be involved with FGB only after the Middendorf Group had
begun to split apart. The primary agents in the BCCI takeover of FGB were Lance,
Stephens, and Eugene Metzger, a Washington attorney who had formerly served
in the Justice Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It
appears that BCCI was first interested in the FGB subsidiary, National Bank of
Georgia. During a meeting with a BCCI representative in Little Rock, Arkansas,
Stephens and Lance suggested that they purchase FGB. Shortly thereafter, the
pair, joined by Metzger, began to accumulate large holdings of FGB stock,

purchased on both the open market and from individual shareholders. These
shares were then sold to investors operating on behalf of BCCI, including Kamal
Adham.

By January 1978, BCCI had secretly gained control of 20 percent of FGB.
Facing a hostile takeover, the bank’s leadership hit back with a lawsuit aimed at
Abedi, Lance, Metzger, Stephens, and Stephens’ companies Stephens Inc. and
Systematics.” The US Securities and Exchange Commission launched its own
suit, charging securities fraud. To defend itself against this legal onslaught, the
“Lance group” retained the services of Clark Clifford and Robert Altman.
According to Clifford and Altman, this was their first interaction with BCCI. Their
timeline may not have been entirely truthful, however, considering the contents of
a Washington Post article from December 1977. In the article, Altman is quoted as
saying that Lance was involved with “Middle Eastern financial interests” and had
set up for them “a holding company to direct their capital into banks and other
US. investments.”

The SEC suit was settled quickly, but the challenge posed by FGB tossed
roadblock after roadblock in BCCT’s path. The battle dragged on for a year before a
Maryland judge ruled in favor of FGB, stating that the bank could not be acquired
via hostile takeover. BCCI was blocked but not defeated. Clifford selected three of
his close associates to act as hidden proxies for BCCI’s interests and managed to
get them onto the board of FGB. One of these individuals, former Senator Stuart
Symington, was also made the chairman of a company, registered in the
Netherland Antilles, called Credit and Commerce American Holdings N.V. Credit
and Commerce American Holdings’ stock was owned by various BCCI principals,
and it acted as the holding company for Credit and Commerce American
Investments B.V..

Another man involved in Credit and Commerce American Holdings was
Mohammed Rahim Motaghi Irvani, an Iranian billionaire and a business partner
of former CIA director Richard Helms. Irvani, referred to in the BCCI Affair as
“BCCT'’s lead front-man in the original takeover” of FGB, was directly assisted by
Helms in these efforts. As a result, media reports later noted that “U.S. Senate
investigators are examining dealings between Helms and Irvani that it said raise
questions about the CIA knowledge of BCCI’s evolution into a criminal

organization.”28

Helms and Irvani also had interlocking business interests with Roy Carlson,
the Bank of America executive who had overseen the bank’s 1972 purchase of 30
percent of BCCI’s shares. In 1975, Carlson left Bank of America to oversee the
business interests of Irvani.2? Years later, Carlson became vice president at Helm’s
consulting firm.22 Both Carlson and Abedi also had documented ties to BCCI.
Carlson had accompanied Abedi on business trips, while Irvani had been
recruited into BCCI’s affairs directly by Abedi himself.*+

This maze-like structure of offshore companies hid the ultimate controlling
body, which of course was BCCI. By forming yet another layer, a dummy
company set up beneath Credit and Commerce American Holdings, BCCI was
able to evade the prohibition of regulators and finally take control of FGB.
Clifford and Altman relayed to regulators that these new purchasers were in no
way connected to BCCI, and despite the overwhelming abundance of evidence
that they were BCCI proxies, the Federal Reserve and other regulators began the
approval process. In this sudden about-face, the US government appeared to be
simply ignoring the obvious.

Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary for housing—federal housing
commissioner at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development during
the George H.W.Bush administration and an investment banker with the
Hamilton Securities Group and Dillon, Read & Co., was placed on the board of
First American Bankshares (the name of FGB following its takeover by BCCI)
following the collapse of BCCI in 1991. She later stated that, after reading through
troves of documents regarding the bank’s activities prior to its implosion, it was
clear that there was “no way” its clandestine activities were carried on without the
full knowledge of the Federal Reserve, specifically the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, and the White House.” Did such knowledge extend back to the when
BCCI finally gained control of FGB?

After the takeover, FGB was rechristened First American Bankshares, and an
impressive plan for growth was launched. Clifford stated that he wanted First
American “to be one of the twenty biggest banks in the country,’ and, by 19839, it
held over $11.5 billion in assets. It also embarked on a close working
relationship with its hidden parent company. Dozens of BCCI subsidiaries held
accounts at First American branches, and Abedi arranged for BCCI managers to
take top positions at the bank.

Meanwhile, Abedi courted US politicians and developed a particularly close
bond with Jimmy Carter.

As BCCI burrowed deeper into the US financial system, Abedi and his close
cohorts became involved with the Carter Presidential Center. Abedi, Adnan
Khashoggi, and Clifford were all large donors to the center, and BCCI became a
mega-donor to a third world development project set up by Carter called Global
2000. Abedi was selected to serve as co-chairman of Global 2000, while Carter
himself was the acting chairman.“

Another politically connected philanthropic outfit that BCCI became
connected to was called the Chiefs of Police National Drug Task Force (COP),
which received money from First American.3 The head of COP was the Utah
senator Orrin Hatch, who became a defender of BCCI during its collapse and who
had ties to a number of its principals. Another figure involved in COP was Randy
Anderson, the son of DC journalist Jack Anderson whose roles in Watergate and
the Profumo Affair were discussed in previous chapters.

First American's board included Robert Keith Gray, who joined shortly after
the bank was renamed.*° Seven years later, in 1988 — after Gray had rejoined Hill
& Knowlton, with his Gray and Company becoming a subsidiary of the firm - H
& K was retained by BCCI after the bank was indicted in Tampa for drug-money
laundering. As part of its campaign to distance BCCI’s image from illicit activity,
H & K “disseminated materials discrediting persons and publications whose
statements were later proved accurate about BCCI’s criminality:

As for FGB’s/First American's subsidiary, National Bank of Georgia — it was
purchased by BCCI front man and business partner of Armand Hammer, Ghaith
Pharaon. While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency expressed concern
over the purchase, the regulators ultimately allowed these transactions to go
through. Roy Carlson, the former Bank of America executive who first forged ties
between that bank and BCCI, was “recruited by Abedi to run the National Bank of
Georgia” after it was purchased by Pharaon.*8 Several years later, Pharaon resold
the bank to none other than First American.

Pharaon, it should be mentioned, maintained significant political connections
of his own. Just prior to his first encounter with Bert Lance, he had bought a large
block of stock in the Main Bank of Houston, Texas. Another Arab investor was the
Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, the power behind the prominent National
Commercial Bank. Like Pharaon, bin Mahfouz was extremely close to BCCI and

even owned shares in the bank. Later, in 1986, plans were underway for bin
Mahfouz to take over both BCCI, and Credit and Commerce American Holdings,
but internal auditors for National Commercial raised too many questions about
the arrangement.*2

Other investors in Main Bank alongside Pharaon and bin Mahfouz included
John Connally, the former governor in Texas who was soon to become a major
player in the world of defrauding savings and loans. There was also James R. Bath,
a close friend of George W. Bush and, according to his former partner, Bill White,
a CIA asset who had been personally recruited by George H.W.Bush in 1976,
when Bush was director of the Agency.*2

Bath had a long career in aviation, real estate, and finance. Early on, he became
a vice president at the Texas division of Atlantic Aviation, which was controlled by
the powerful DuPont family. This was followed by Bath/Bentsen Interests, a real
estate development company that he co-founded with Lan Bentsen, the son of
future Clinton treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen Jr. In 1976, the year he was
reportedly recruited by G. H.W. Bush and the CIA, he created Jim Bath and
Associates. Almost immediately thereafter, Bath’s career took a rapid, upward
ascent: “He was named as trustee for Sheikh Salem bin Laden of Saudi Arabia....
Bath's job was to handle all of bin Ladens North American investments and
operations”! He also was made the trustee for bin Mahfouz’s US investments.

Russ Baker, in Family of Secrets, recounts how Bill White told him that Bath’s
recruitment by G. H.W.Bush was intimately connected to the growing relationship
between Saudi Arabia and Texas oil.4# Bath, it seems, was something of a middle
man for these two parties — and his presence alongside the two BCCI-linked
individuals, Khalid bin Mahfouz and Ghaith Pharaon, should be understood in
that context.

BCCI’ reach extended far beyond Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United
States, as it was truly global in scope. The bank maintained, for example, a
presence in the People’s Republic of China. During the “reform and opening up”
of the PRC under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, BCCI was the second foreign
bank to open branches in the country. It “secured substantial deposits from the
Chinese government and its business affiliates”; according to the BCCI Affair,
Chinese officials and government entities lost around $500 million when the bank

collapsed. BCCI also maintained joint ventures with other businesses within

China. One of these was the China-Arab Bank, a joint venture with the Abu Dhabi
Investment Authority.

At the time, the relationship between the PRC and the Soviet Union was
considerably strained — and yet BCCI was in the USSR as well. In an appendix to
the BCCI Affair titled “Matters for Further Investigation,” the joint activities of
BCCI and the Foreign Trade Mission of the Soviet Union in London was
highlighted as significant, but little information was added. The report states that
“obtaining the records of those financial transactions would be critical to
understanding what the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov
was doing in the West.”“+

One clue as to USSR-connected activities was reported by Jonathan Beaty and
S. C. Gwynne in their book on BCCI. Beaty was told by a German arms dealer,
whom they refer to as “Heinrich,” that the Soviets were buying Western high
technology via BCCI - in this instance the Navstar GPS system.

Throughout the third world, BCCI presented itself as a development bank.
This allowed it to gain intimate access to governments, emerging markets, and the
financing systems that they required. It was the “second largest of all lenders to the
Congo, while in Cameroon it developed close ties to the country’s finance
ministry — and bribed them to take high-interest loans from the bank.4® The BCCI
Affair charges that BCCI cultivated relationships with the United Nations outpost
and the US embassy in Cameroon as well. In Nigeria, meanwhile, BCCI cozied up
to the nation’s central bank and apparently traveled with their top financial
functionaries throughout the world. One witness reported that, at a meeting of
the World Bank in Seoul, they had observed “one of the BCC[I] officers with a lot
of cash, handing it out to the staff of the central bank of Nigeria.”*4

In Jamaica, BCCI became the intermediary between the state and the world
financial system. It handled “essentially every foreign current account of Jamaican
government agencies.“® US government agencies were involved in this
corruption of the Jamaican government, as BCCI became “involved in financing
all of Jamaicas commodity imports from the United States under the US.
Commodity Credit Corporation.” The CCC itself was no stranger to
skullduggery. As will be seen, it was implicated - along with BCCI and several
connected banks — in the transfer of armaments and munitions to Iraq at the
height of the Iran-Iraq War.

Through the Gulf Group — headed by Abbas, Mustafa, and Murtaza Gokal -
BCCI had a foothold in global shipping. Abedi was particularly close to Abbas
Gokal, the main figure in Gulf’s shipping lines. He had courted him early on in
BCCI’s existence, and an ever-escalating series of loans fueled the Gokal’s
maritime interests, allowing the family to quickly control an impressive fleet. The
Gulf Group and BCCI were so fundamentally interwoven, acting as practical
extensions of one another, that when BCCI collapsed, the resulting shockwaves
profoundly destabilized Gulf?

Like Ghaith Pharaon, Abbas Gokal sometimes acted as a front man or proxy
for BCCI. In 1975, for example, he attempted to acquire Chelsea National Bank, a
small New York City bank. Regulators very quickly recognized that Gokal had
practically no familiarity with the ins and outs of bank ownership - and they saw
how closely tied he was to BCCI. In 1976, Gokal admitted that, upon acquiring
the bank, he had planned to bring in a BCCI management team to run its
operations.>+

In the early 1980s, Gokal approached the intelligence/organized crime-linked
Bruce Rappaport with an offer to buy 50 percent of his Inter Maritime Bank.
Rappaport declined the offer and instead sold 19.9 percent of the bank’s shares to
the Gulf Group and added Abbas to his board of directors** Later, when he was
shuffled off to prison for his fraudulent activities with BCCI, Abbas’ personal
secretary went to work for Rappaport.

Was Gokal fronting for BCCI in Rappaport’s organization? It seems likely, as
Rappaport himself maintained numerous ties to the bank. One of his top money
managers, the Swiss banker Alfred Hartmann, was himself a BCCI frontman,
while Rappaport held a significant stake in the illustrious Bank of New York,
which was one of BCCI’s correspondent banks. Bert Lance, meanwhile, had
mentioned Rappaport in his testimony before the official BCCI inquiry, stating
that he believed that Rappaport had been dispatched by William Casey,
Rappaport’s close friend, to spy on him and keep tabs on BCCI. “Lance said that
Rappaport maintained contact with him for a period of years until the death of
Director [William] Casey,’ the BCCI Affair states, before adding that Lance “failed
to mention in his testimony that despite his suspicions of Rappaport, he arranged
with him to have one of his sons work in the financier’s New York bank”$3

Both Rappaport and BCCI were also engaged in various activities in the oil-
rich nation of Oman. BCCI had been active there since 1973, when, together with

Bank of America, it set up the National Bank of Oman. Peter Truell and Larry
Gurwin, in False Profits, note that the National Bank of Oman “became one of
BCCI’ biggest units, with fifty-five branches.”** Tellingly, the BCCI Affair suggests
that “BCCI may have been moving money through the National Bank of Oman to
fund the war in Afghanistan,’ before adding that the National Bank of Oman and
its CEO, Qais-Al Zawawi, also did business with CIA director Casey’s associate,
Bruce Rappaport.

Interestingly, one of the most active players in Oman’s oil market was John
Deuss, the enigmatic oil trader whom Ted Shackley had gone to work for after
leaving the CIA. In fact, Deuss reportedly hired Shackley specifically to help him
operate in Oman.*° According to one of Deuss’ associates, journalist Susan Mazur,
Deuss’ main contact in Oman was Qais-Al Zawawi of the National Bank of Oman.
Could there have been a connection with the purported use of the bank by the
CIA to finance the Afghan Mujahideen? It is certainly possible. As mentioned in
the last chapter, there are rumors that EATSCO, the freight forwarder managed by
Shackley’s crony Thomas Clines, was involved in the movement of arms and other
war supplies to the Mujahideen.

Yet another major player in Oman during this period was a firm called Tetra
Tech International. Once a subsidiary of Honeywell, Tetra Tech was run by
former CIA officer James Critchfield, who was not only an old Middle East hand,
but also a close associate of Shackley. In 1979, Tetra Tech was “given supervisory
control ... over the operations of [eleven] government ministries.°2 Major
construction projects, the management of ports, the telecommunication
infrastructure, the post office, and food inspections were just a handful of the
things that Tetra Tech controlled in Oman. In addition, as noted in the last
chapter, Donald Jameson, a CIA veteran who went to work for Tetra Tech, had
been one of the attendees of the Le Cercle meeting tied to the October Surprise
plot.

As the BCCI Affair makes clear, investigators also suspected a potential
connection between Tetra Tech International and the similarly named Tetra
Finance, a Hong Kong-based financial outfit that was closely integrated with the
Hong Kong Deposit and Guaranty Company. Playing an active role in each of
these institutions was John Shaheen, one of William Casey’s “Hardy Boys” and a
central figure in the October Surprise plot. Shaheen was paid by each bank to
broker deposits and to court wealthy Arabs to join their boards. Individuals who

maintained a post on the board of each included Hassan Yassin, Kamal Adham’s
successor as Saudi intelligence chief and a cousin of Adnan Khashoggi. Another
was Al Mazrui, the head of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and director at
BCCI.

Once again, BCCI appears, albeit surrounded by heavy fog, in the background
of the covert conflicts of the 1980s. The support for the Mujahideen was just one
of many such instances. Another is the Iran-Contra affair. A global web of
operations and cooperating and competing factions, each with logistical networks
dedicated to arms dealing, drug smuggling, and money laundering, the
complexity of Iran-Contra is simply mind-boggling. Despite its involution, at
nearly every level of these interlocking components and operations, one invariably
finds the tendrils of BCCI.

BLACK EAGLE

hen the Kerry Commission on terrorism, narcotics, and international

operations was underway in the early 1990s, longtime BCCI executive
Amjad Awan was one of the witnesses called to testify. Awan told the commission
that he had acted as the banker for Manuel Noriega, the strong-man who had first
come to power in Panama in 1983. Noriega would deposit “$3 million at a time in
$100 bills” in BCCI, while Awan would disperse “$20,000 payments to
Panamanian politicians at Noriega’s request.”>2

Furthermore, according to Awan, Clark Clifford's partner Robert Altman had
personally intervened to obscure the massive flow of Noriega-connected funds
into BCCI. As BCCI collapsed and regulators and politicians subpoenaed internal
bank documents, Altman hid them by having them relabeled as “attorney work
product.”

A sizable chunk of Noriega’s wealth came from his deep involvement in the
Latin America drug trade. According to Carlos Lehder, the Medellin cartel boss
who had worked closely with Robert Vesco in the Bahamas, Noriega reached an
agreement with Pablo Escobar and other Medellin leaders that made Panama a
transshipment point for Colombian cocaine destined for the US. In exchange for
“$1000 for each kilogram of cocaine and a percentage of every dollar of drug
proceeds flown to Panamanian banks,’ Noriega was purported to have guaranteed

the safe passage of drug flights in and out of various airstrips across the country.

Partial corroboration of Lehder’s claims comes from Steven Kalish, an
American drug smuggler who worked closely with Noriega’s pilot, Cesar
Rodriguez. Kalish was made a partner in Servicios Turisticos, a Panamanian
airline owned by Rodriguez and Noriega, and was given “special military
protection for shipments of money into the country.” According to Kalish, the
relationship between Noriega and the Medellin cartel did not fully blossom until
1984, when he arranged for some of their cohorts to be released from Panamanian
jail.

Noriega was also a CIA asset and had been since 1967, becoming the
Agency's eyes and ears in Panama. He became particularly close to George
H.W.Bush when the future president was director of the CIA. Peter Dale Scott and
Jonathan Marshall write that, in 1976, “CIA director George Bush arranged to pay
Noriega $110,000 for his services [and] put the Panamanian up as a house guest
of his deputy CIA director.”®2 Noriega enjoyed a similar camaraderie with Bush’s
rival, CIA director William Casey, who is alleged to have met with Noriega
repeatedly in Washington, DC.

That Noriega served as both de facto drug baron and the CIA’s man in Panama
became an issue for the US during the early 1980s, when Casey launched the first
operations to support the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight against the ruling
Sandinistas of Nicaragua. According to various journalists writing in the late
1980s this operation was code-named “Black Eagle.”

Howard Kohn and Vicky Monks, in their 1989 Rolling Stone article on the
operation, stated that, very early on, Casey recruited Israel’s Mossad “to arrange
for the acquisition and shipping of weapons to the Contras.”®> As noted in the last
chapter, Mossad had its own man in Panama, Michael Harari, who worked as an
arms trafficker and security consultant for Noriega. The “Harari network,” as it
was later dubbed, overlapped with the drug smuggling networks that were
operated in Panama by the Medellin cartel. Though he was no longer officially in
the employ of Mossad by this point, Harari’s activities were funded to the tune of
$20 million from Israel.°°

José Blandón, one of Noriega’s top advisors, later told journalists that Harari
had worked with Duane Clarridge, the head of CIA operations in Latin America,
and Donald Gregg, Vice President Bush's National Security Advisor, to establish a
network of bases for logistical support of the Contra conflict. Kohn and Monks
appear to corroborate Blandon’s story, writing that the vice president's office did

have a role in the Black Eagle operation and that the man on the ground had been
Donald Gregg. They add that the airstrips in Panama utilized by the CIA were the
same as those being used by the Medellin cartel and that the arrangement
between these parties had first been set up by Israel.

Independent accounts show that the prime years that Black Eagle was
purported to have been running, 1982 and 1983, were busy ones for the US and
Israel. In November 1982, the US government admitted to supporting rebel
forces in Nicaragua. By March of the following year, the CIA had set up a $50
million intelligence apparatus in Latin America that was largely focused on
Nicaragua, and US military advisors were placed in Honduras to advise the main
Contra group, the Fuerza Democratica de Nicaragua or FDN. In the summer of
1983, the New York Times reported that Israel, at the urging of the US, was
providing arms, confiscated from the PLO in Lebanon to the Contras.

In 1984 and 1985, Black Eagle began to fall apart. This was in no small part
thanks to Noriega. As Kohn and Monks noted:

While helping to raise funds for the contras, Noriega was pursuing a favorite pastime — adding
to his store of potential political-blackmail material. An insatiable collector of “negative
information” about both friends and foes, Noriega is known to have hidden video and audio
equipment in government offices to record meetings and phone calls. Early in the Black Eagle
operation, according to Blandon, Noriega began to compile a dossier about the role of Bush and
his staff. In the dossier is said to be copies of status reports sent to Gregg and videotapes of
meetings held in Noriega’s office, plus a special report that Blandon prepared about Black Eagle

on Noriega’s orders. °8

With Noriega acting increasingly bold, tensions reportedly developed
between US and Israeli operators throughout Latin America, each worried that
the other would hang them out to dry if the link between the pro-Contra efforts
and the Medellin drug flights was revealed.

Another issue was the increasing unpopularity of the Contra war in the US.
Beginning in 1982, a series of laws passed by Congress limited the ability of the
Reagan administration to provide military aid to Contra groups. This reached its
apex with the 1984 Boland Amendment, which prohibited all US military aid to
the Contras and hampered the CIAs Nicaraguan operations. With a crisis
mounting, Casey began to search for an alternative system that would allow him
to continue the covert war. Soon, with the aid of his new protégé Oliver North,
“the Enterprise” would be up and running.

The Enterprise appears to have been named as such because it was
fundamentally a money-making endeavor, and its numerous tendrils and
interlocking components cut across as many business ventures as they did covert
operations. It was also an offshoot — if not a direct continuation — of Shackley’s
private-intelligence apparatus. Richard Secord, who had been involved in the
overbilling scam at the Pentagon that provided funding for EATSCO, was one of
North’s right-hand men in the Enterprises money networks. Joining him was
Albert Hakim, another veteran of Shackley’s world, as was Thomas Clines. As
alluded to previously, the arms-for-hostage deals that ultimately torpedoed the
Enterprise's activities had come to North's attention from a complex changing of
hands. It had originated, however, in a meeting between Shackley and Iranian
interests.

North, a marine and veteran of the Vietnam War, was apparently recruited
into Shackley’s network in the early 1980s. In 1981, he joined the National
Security Council (NSC), and in 1983 — right in the middle of Black Eagle — he
became the NSC’s deputy director for political-military affairs. During his first
two years at the NSC, however, he was an assistant to Robert “Bud” MacFarlane,
who soon became Reagan's National Security Advisor. MacFarlane's career had
depended on his development and maintenance of connections to prominent
players. For instance, he had served as military assistant to Henry Kissinger and
accompanied him on his secret trips to China. At the end of the 1970s, he was
appointed by John Tower to head the US Senate Committee on Armed Services,
and in 1981 he became an assistant to Alexander Haig. Tower's critical role in the
subversion of US national security by aiding Robert Maxwell in the PROMIS
scandal is detailed in chapter 9. Notably, Tower and Maxwell had first been
brought together by Henry Kissinger.

According to Joseph Trento, MacFarlane's early work for Kissinger had been
arranged by his mentor, Col. Jack Brennan, who was Nixon’s last chief of staff.
Brennan and MacFarlane had stayed in touch over the years, and, at some point,
North, while working under MacFarlane, was introduced to Brennan's associate,
Lt. Col. James M. Tully. Tully was close to Shackley and Secord.

Trento writes that he was told by Marine colonel and sometimes CIA asset
William Corson that North had informed him about his growing ties to this
crowd, who were then being used to operate off-the-books operations for the CIA
and the National Security Council. “It was then that I realized what had

happened,” Corson reportedly said. “These dumb bastards got sucked into the old
Ed Wilson crowd: Shackley, Secord, Clines. The administration had let these guys

in the tent, and it was only a matter of time before they owned the circus.”

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENTERPRISE

he basis for the Enterprise was a company founded by Richard Secord and

Albert Hakim in 1983 called Stanford Technology Trading Group
International (STIGI). It was one of many similarly-named companies that the
pair had set up. They had formed the nearly identical Stanford Technology
Corporation in the 1970s, and had since set up StanTech Services S.A.; Stanford
Technology Corporation Services, S.A.; and Scitech, S.A, among others. A year
after SITGI was formed, North introduced Secord to Adolfo Calero, the leader of
the FDN, the CIAs preferred Contra group. An arrangement was made where,
thanks to a sizable cash donation from Saudi Arabia, SITGI would buy arms and
resell them to the Contras.

This basic business arrangement rapidly ballooned during 1985 and 1986.
Throughout 1985, Manucher Ghorbanifar (who, as previously noted, had brought
an arms-for-hostages deal to Shackley), Israel’s David Kimche, and Michael
Ledeen met multiple times to discuss the possibility of an arrangement between
the Reagan administration, Israel, and Iran. Ledeen often reported back to
McFarlane, who was by then National Security Advisor, on these meetings. At the
end of August of that year, a US arms package — including 100 TOW missiles —
was dispatched to Iran via Israel. The initial financing for this shipment, which
was routed through his accounts at BCCI, was provided by Adnan Khashoggi.

Ledeen was, at this time, operating from North’s office at the NSC, though he
later claimed that North was unaware of the arms sales. North, he continued, was
busy trying to arrange for the freeing of the hostages in Lebanon. Ledeen was
likely dissembling: according to the Tower Report, McFarlane told President
Reagan that Israel has “taken it upon themselves” to sell arms to Iran in order to
try to get hostages released. Roughly a month after this first arms sale, Kimche
contacted McFarlane with news that one of the hostages was to be released, and
more would follow. Records show that North was tasked with handling this
situation.

By October, North was holding meetings with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar as
well as Al Schwimmer and other players on the Israeli side of the operation in DC.
The arms sales continued smoothly for the next several months. January 1986 was
when the operation took on another dimension. During the course of a meeting
between Oliver North, Edwin Meese, and Amiram Nir, Israeli prime minister
Shimon Peres’ top counterterrorism advisor, Nir reportedly suggested to North
that funds from the arms sales could be diverted to support the Contras. Shortly
after this meeting, funds now destined for the Contras began to be routed through
the Enterprise's byzantine maze of corporate shell and holding companies.

The Enterprise maintained dozens of accounts held in the names of various
dummy companies, usually in Swiss banks such as Credit Suisse. The primary
receiving accounts, which dispersed money outward into the corporate
compartments set up for the ongoing operations, included Energy Resources
International, Lake Resources Inc., and the Hyde Square Park Corporation.
North’s Israeli co-conspirators may have had access to these accounts as well.“

In order to manage this complex web, the Enterprise retained the services of
Willard Zucker and the Geneva company he worked for, Compagnie de Services
Fiduciaire or CSF. Zucker, a US tax lawyer, “had provided Hakim with financial
services since the mid-1970s, when Hakim still lived in Iran” Zucker’s
connection to these players is made all the more interesting because of his
background. He had been afhliated with Investors Overseas Services and had
gained a seat on the mutual fund’s board during the ouster of its founder, Bernard
Cornfeld. There are various rumors and suggestions that Zucker was one of
Vesco’s proxies whom he arranged to get onto the IOS board.

Zucker’s role in Vesco’s takeover was obliquely referenced in a letter he wrote
to Hakim concerning a trip he took to Seattle to discuss a series of business
ventures with other Enterprise partners. Zucker states in the letter that he had met
a businessman from Colorado who was involved in a venture with the politically
connected oilman John M. King. The man offered to send Zucker materials
relating to the venture, but Zucker declined. He added to Hakim that King “hates
my guts because I helped bring down King Resources, the Colorado
Corporation? Z

IOS had been involved with King Resources in some oil-and-gas ventures in
the late 1960s, while King Resources acted as one of IOS’ biggest clients. King was
close to Edward Cowett, IOS’ general counsel, director, and a member of its

executive team. When IOS began to fall apart, Cowett conspired to help King take
control of the company from Cornfeld. It was not meant to be. King failed and his
King Resources slid into bankruptcy, while Vesco, King’s competitor, claimed the
mutual fund.

In June 1982, CSF set up a Bermuda-based subsidiary called CSF Investments
Ltd. Legal work for this company was carried out by Conyers Dill & Pearman —
one of the preeminent firms specializing in offshore finance, with outposts across
the Caribbean, London, and Hong Kong. The firm’s cofounder, Nicholas Bayard
Dill, was a powerful presence in Bermuda politics. He and his law partner, James
Pearman, were directors of Coastal Caribbean Oils & Minerals Ltd. According to
the National Security Archive's Iran-Contra chronology, Secord owned stock in
this same company in the early 1980s.28 Later, when Contra support operations
were fully underway, CSF Investments was used to acquire aircraft.

The Enterprise maintained numerous companies to manage the aviation wing
of the Contra support operations. Southern Air Transport (SAT), the CIA
proprietary airline utilized in the Contra airlift that was previously Air America
(and before that, Civil Air Transport), worked closely with an Enterprise dummy
company, registered in Panama, called Albon Values Corp. David Rogers, a
journalist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote that “public records in Panama City list
employees in the Geneva firm, [CSF], as principals in Albon Values Corp....
Roland Farina, an accountant at CSF, and Jacques Mossaz, an attorney at the Swiss
firm, are listed as principal officers in Albon Values, which was registered by a
Panama City law firm, Quijano & Associados, frequently used by CSF? 2

Costa Rica was one of the main staging grounds for North’s pro-Contra
operations. Land belonging to John Hull, an American rancher, was the main
location for the Contra airlift. Hull, who reportedly received a $10,000 monthly
retainer from the Enterprise, claimed to have been the CIA’s main liaison with the
Contras between 1982 and 1986.82 His involvement in covert operations seems,
however, to have begun before 1982. Two years earlier, a far-right paramilitary
group used his ranch as their base to launch an attack on a left-wing Costa Rican
radio station. Hull was also reportedly close to the Free Costa Rica Movement,
that country’s branch of the World Anti-Communist League.

In frequent contact with Hull was Robert Owen, who had been selected by
North to serve as his own liaison to the Contras. Owen — unsurprisingly — had ties

to Shackley that went back to the Vietnam War, and through him he had met Neil
Livingstone.

Livingstone, as discussed, had been involved in Panama with Michael Harari,
which opens the possibility that he may have been involved with Black Eagle.
After Owen served a stint on the staff of Senator Dan Quayle, Livingstone
recruited him to work at Gray and Company, the PR firm set up by Robert Keith
Gray during his time away from H & K.©

Under the auspices of a PR campaign for the Contras, Livingstone set up a
nonprofit organization called the Institute for Terrorism and Subnational Conflict,
located in the Washington, DC, offices of the American Security Council. What it
was really designed to do, according to the Congressional report on the Iran-
Contra affair, was to act as an Enterprise cut-out to pay Owen for his work. To
receive these funds, Owen set up his own organization, the Institute for
Democracy, Education, and Assistance (IDEA).

The same day that IDEA was formed, Owen set up a sister organization, the
Council for Democracy, Education and Assistance.% One of the council’s
directors, aside from Owen, was a retired Air Force general, John Flynn, who had
reportedly been recruited by Hull to serve in that role. The council took in some
$66,000 in donations for the Contras, all reportedly from the fundraising activities
of conservative activist Carl “Spitz” Channell. In 1984, Channell had organized a
tax-exempt foundation for the purpose of soliciting donations. This foundation,
the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty was North’s vehicle of
choice for garnering private donations for the Contras and other worldwide
“freedom fighters” being backed by the Reagan administration.

Through the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, money
provided by wealthy donors courted by North and his associates — individuals like
Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, Ellen Garwood, the daughter of a prominent
New Deal-era administrator, and prolific confidence man E. Trine Starnes — would
be flushed into an offshore banking system. Channell’s partner was a PR man by
the name of Richard Miller, who maintained a company called International
Business Communications. Money from the National Endowment for the
Preservation of Liberty would flow to International Business Communications,
which in turn would deposit the money into bank accounts in the Cayman Islands
under the name of “LC., Inc.” I.C., Inc. would then move the money to Enterprise

bank accounts in Switzerland belonging to Lake Resources.®@

Another fundraising apparatus utilized by the Enterprise was Citizens for
America. Founded by conservative activist Lewis Lehrman, Citizens for
America was, for a time, run by the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Citizens for
America’s executives met personally with President Reagan. The organization
would reappear during the Franklin child abuse scandal in Nebraska (discussed in
chapter 10), as Lawrence King, the man at the center of that sexual-abuse ring,
was a board member of and donor to Citizens for America during the Contra
years.

By 1985, cracks in the Boland Amendment were forming, and the covert
apparatus was ready to take full advantage of the opportunities at hand. Congress
was still blocking “lethal aid,” but it authorized the State Department to move
“humanitarian” supplies to the Contras. A special organization, the Nicaraguan
Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO) was set up under the leadership of
Ambassador Robert Duemling. From the outset, the NHAO was an extension of
the Enterprise. It provided money to Owen's IDEA, and Owen himself became an
NHAO consultant. The CIA, meanwhile, recommended and vetted the
companies that the office utilized to move the aid.®8

This vetting process brought in a number of intriguing partners. One of these
was the shrimp company Frigorificos de Puntarenas and its sister firm, Ocean
Hunter. As previously discussed, Frigorificos was found to have been footing the
bill for the storage of Robert Vesco’s aircraft in Costa Rica and was itself run by
representatives of the Colombian drug cartels. One principal of both companies,
Luis Rodriguez, was found by the FBI to have been “funding the Contras through
‘narcotics transactions.”®2

At the same time that the State Department was unlocking funds for
Frigorificos and its principals were busy at work in the blossoming cocaine trade,
North, Owen, and rancher Hull were working closely with those behind
Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter on developing maritime warfare capacity for the
Contras.22 Memos written by Owen refer to Frigorificos/Ocean Hunter ships
being used as “motherships” for these operations. Incredibly, they also reference a
“DEA person who might help with the boats.”

Another curious pair of companies that simultaneously received NHAO
funds, got tapped by the Enterprise for military support, and were implicated in
drug-running operations were SETCO Aviation and Hondu Carib. Hondu Carib
had been formed by Frank Moss, who had been a pilot for SETCO. According to

the report of the Kerry Commission on narcotics trafficking, SETCO “had a long-
standing relationship with the largest of the Contra groups, the Honduras-based
FDN”? The aviation company, importantly, had been set up by “Honduran
cocaine trafficker Juan Matta Ballesteros”? Matta, described in the press as the
“boss of bosses of Mexico’s cocaine industry,’ mainly partnered with the Cali
cartel, which, by the 1990s, had overtaken the Medellin cartel as the dominant
drug empire in Colombia.”

Matta and other members of his organization, the Guadalajara, were
implicated in the kidnapping, interrogation, brutal torture, and murder of DEA
agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, which took place in early February 1985. The
cartel boss who had personally ordered the kidnapping of Camarena, Felix
Gallardo, was reported to have bragged in court that he had “[supplied] arms to
the Contras” and had brought together a network of drug traffickers “to finance
their [the Contras] cause during 1983 and 1984, in exchange for protection”?

Phil Jordan, former director of the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center, later
reported that he was informed by Mexican authorities that “CIA operatives” were
present for the interrogation and torture of Camarena and had made tape
recordings of the agent’s final hours. Hector Berrellez, the DEA agent who led
the investigation into Camarenas death, stated that the CIA provided the DEA
with those tapes. Camarena was first kidnapped by members of La Dirección
Federal de Seguridad (DFS), a now-shuttered Mexican intelligence agency and
secret police. When Felix Gallardo was boasting of his ties to the Contras, he also
claimed that Contras were being trained at a law-enforcement training facility
maintained by the DFS, which was acting as a front for the CIA.

Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, SETCO and Hondu Carib - these are just a
few of the ClA-vetted companies that were recommended to the State
Department for the delivery of “humanitarian aid” to the Contras. There was also
Vortex, a Miami-based aviation concern run by Michael B. Palmer. The Kerry
Commission report notes that, at the time Vortex was getting NHAO contracts
for supply runs, “Palmer was under active investigation by the FBI in three
jurisdictions in connection with his decade-long activity as a drug smuggler, and a
federal grand jury was preparing to indict him in Detroit”? One of Vortex’s
employees in this period, Joseph Haas, “was suspected of involvement in drug

trafficking and had been a suspected marijuana trafficker since 1984.22 He had

also been a CIA contract agent but was “taken off’ CIA's payroll” in 1987
“because he had gone to work for a US law enforcement agency.’ 1%

Vortex was brought to the NHAO’s attention by Pat Foley, described in the
Kerry Commission report as the “president of Summit Aviation.’12+ What the
report left out, however, was that Foley had been (or had continued to be) a CIA
operative and had earlier flown 747s on behalf of Flying Tiger Lines, the aviation
company set up by the Chennaults and where Robert Keith Grey had maintained
a spot on the board.+® Summit Aviation, too, had a fascinating history: it had
been founded by Richard C. du Pont Jr., a member of the illustrious DuPont
chemicals family and the son of one of the great boosters of aviation in the 1930s.
Besides Summit, Richard Jr. served as a director at Edward du Pont’s Atlantic
Aviation, where the aforementioned CIA asset and Bush ally, James R. Bath, had
served as vice president.

In September 1983, a Cessna 404 twin-engine propeller plane entered the
airspace of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua and began a miniature bombing
run. The aircraft was quickly shot down, and Sandinista authorities found that it
had been dispatched from Costa Rica. A subsequent investigation in the US press
revealed that the plane had come from a company called Investair Leasing
Corporation, headed by the former vice president of the CIA proprietary airline
Intermountain Aviation. Before its doomed flight, it had been purchased by
Summit Aviation, which had modified it with bombing capabilities and machine
guns.

SINGLAUB AND GEOMILITECH

he bombing attempt carried out by Summit Aviation foreshadowed some of

the later activities of the Enterprise. For example, there was the case of
Civilian Materiel Assistance (CMA), a militia group — likely a cover for members
of the 20th Special Forces Group — that managed a Contra-support network and
conducted cross-border raids with Contra forces from Honduras into
Nicaragua.1%? The CMA’s active presence in the conflict was revealed in 1984
when one of its helicopters was shot down, killing two of the group’s members.
Despite the exposure, the CMAs head, Thomas Posey, continued the Contra
support operations and was linked to arms deals taking place at John Hull’s ranch.

Working closely with the CMA, and then later with the Enterprise, was Gen.
John K. Singlaub. Singlaub was a veteran of the old OSS China network, which
means that his entry into the world of covert activities took place alongside
seasoned operators such as Paul Helliwell and E. Howard Hunt. After the war, he
continued his military career while serving as one of the CIA’ clandestine
watriors, popping up in special operations the world over. By the late 1970s, he
departed from a high-ranking military position to protest Carter administration
policies. It parallels the attitude of Shackley, with whom Singlaub was reportedly
associated in Vietnam.

During the 1980s, Singlaub headed the US Council for World Freedom, the
US branch of a global network of spies, criminals, Nazi exiles, fascist operators,
and death squad leaders belonging to the World Anti-Communist League“ By
1984, he was serving as the chairman of the league itself. Prior to this, some of the
leading lights of the organization included Roger Pearson, an anthropologist who
maintained ties to groups such as Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby. Another was Swiss
attorney Pierre Schifferli, who was rumored to have been involved in arranging
massive weapon deals for UNITA in Angola1°° When he wasn’t arranging
falsified end-user certificates for arms transfers or cavorting with a group called
the Pinochet Foundation, Schifferli worked as one of the attorneys retained by
Bruce Rappaport to represent the interests of Inter Maritime Bank.

The World Anti-Communist League and the US Council for World Freedom
were interlaced with a host of like-minded pressure groups, dark-money fronts,
private-intelligence apparatuses, and closed-door meeting places. These groups
pressed for rolling back Cold War policies and boosting defense spending. More
specifically, they pushed for the continuation and deepening of covert wars across
the world; free trade policies, and other packages beneficial to multinational
corporations; and the curtailing of civil and labor rights. Some of these, such as
the American Security Council, appear to have participated in psychological
operations aimed at the domestic population of the United States as well as
abroad. Others, such as the Council for National Policy, helped broker the cozy
relationship between evangelical Christians and the emergent New Right. High
Frontier lobbied for the Strategic Defense Initiative, while the US Strategy
Council brought together intelligence operatives with representatives of the
Unification Church to coordinate policy and public relations activities,
particularly through the Unification Church-controlled Washington Times.

Another group that operated in close proximity to the World Anti-
Communist League was the Western Goals Foundation, a private-intelligence
outfit set up by Congressman Larry McDonald in 1978. McDonald envisioned
Western Goals as a clearinghouse, working in tandem with other private groups
and law enforcement agencies to collect and share information on domestic
groups deemed threatening to prevailing power structures. They engaged in
propaganda via book publishing and, at one point, “solicited funds to create a
computer database on American subversives” 12 During the 1980s, Western
Goals fell under the control of Spitz Channell, who used it as one of the vehicles
for private fundraising on behalf of the Contras. Notably, Western Goals’ effort
to create a database on “American subversives” would be realized as part of the
“Continuity of Government” protocol, which was developed by key players in the
Enterprise and Iran-Contra and is discussed in chapter 9 in the context of the
PROMIS scandal.

A Western Goals letter from 1983 lists a number of intriguing individuals
comprising the advisory board. There was John Singlaub himself, as well as Adm.
Thomas Moorer from the Nixon days. At this point, Moorer worked at both the
American Security Council and H & K. Another Western Goals advisor was Roy
Cohn. A 1982 New York Times article states that Cohn joined the foundation after
being satisfied that it had “no ties to the right-wing John Birch Society” — despite
Western Goals founder Larry McDonald having been a John Birch leader, and
Cohn’s fellow advisory board member Roger Milliken having funded the
society.

Cohn’s interest in Western Goals may have been tied to the wider pro-Contra
networks that were coalescing across the United States in the early 1980s. At the
time, Cohn was serving as an attorney to his close friend Rupert Murdoch.
(Robert Parry has written that the two first became close due to their mutual
support for Israel.) According to New York Magazine, “Whenever Roy wanted a
story stopped, item put in, or story exploited, Roy called Murdoch?”102 After
Murdoch bought the New York Post, Cohn “wielded the paper as his personal
shiv” 12

At the same time, Cohn was forging close ties with the director of the US
Information Agency, Chad Wick, even hosting a luncheon in Wick’s honor that
was widely attended by influential figures in the conservative press, as well as US
senators and representatives. Soon after, then CIA director William Casey was

spearheading an extensive propaganda campaign to shore up public support for
Reagan's Latin American policies, including support of the Contras.

This domestic effort was technically illegal, which caused the CIA to
outsource the job to the private sector. As Robert Parry reported in 2015, Wick
took the lead in obtaining private funding for the effort, and, just a few days after
Wick promised to find private support, Cohn brought Rupert Murdoch to the
White House. Parry later noted that, after this meeting, “documents released
during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and later from the Reagan Library indicate

that Murdoch was soon viewed as a source for the private funding” for the

propaganda campaign. H

After that meeting, Murdoch became the top media ally of this Casey-directed
propaganda effort and also became increasingly close to the Reagan White House.
Murdoch, as a consequence, benefited greatly from Reagan’s policies and his
friendship with the administration, which allowed Murdoch to increase his US
media holdings and to create the Fox Broadcasting Corporation in 1987.

In addition, Singlaub was named as a “consultant” to a Florida-based company
called GeoMiliTech Consultants Corporation (GMT), which had been put
together by Barbara Studley, a beauty queen turned conservative talk show host in
Florida. Studley had also operated as a lobbyist and had worked at the Pentagon.
The National Security Archive's Iran-Contra Chronology suggests that Studley may
have even set up GMT at the behest of Singlaub, as he was reported to have
“suggested” to Studley that she start the company in 1983.44

GMT worked with various arms dealers to source and transport munitions to
conflict zones such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Among the arms dealers it
worked with were Ernest Werner Glatt and his sometimes partner, Samuel
Cummings. Cummings, by way of his company Interarmco, was a longtime
weapons merchant for the CIA. Cummings’ brother-in-law was none other than
Senator John Tower, who in December 1986 was tapped by President Reagan to
oversee the initial inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair. This was a conflict of
interest of immense proportions. In addition, Tower, at the time, was close to
Robert Maxwell, who had his own role in the Iran arms deals of this period and
was actively working for Israeli intelligence. Also, by this point, Maxwell had
secured Tower a place on the payroll of Israeli intelligence.

It is not surprising, then, that GMT had extremely close ties to Israel.“* The
outfit’s executive vice president, Ron Harel, was a “veteran of the Israeli Air Force

who specialized in ‘tactical cargo and light and early warning aircraft?” H$ He
managed GMT's overseas offices, which was conveniently located in Tel Aviv.

A sister company to GMT, Global Technologies Ltd., was also stationed in
Israel and was overseen by Joel Arnon, an Israeli diplomat and military officer who
was also a vice president of GMT. Global Technologies was located in Tel Aviv’s
Asia House, a striking Bauhaus-style building that housed various diplomats and
embassies. Asia House had been owned by the Israeli billionaire Shaul Eisenberg,
who - as mentioned in chapter 3 -— enjoyed close relations with the Israeli
intelligence and security apparatus. In addition, GMT’s Israeli offices utilized the
banking services of Israel Discount Bank. In 1986, portions of the money that
were provided to Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter was deposited in Israel Discount
Bank. H6

Incredibly, there appears to have been ties between GMT and the clandestine
activities of Robert Maxwell and those in his orbit. Key here was Nicholas Davies,
the globe-trotting foreign editor for Maxwell’s Daily Mirror — where he was often
known by the nickname that his boss had bestowed upon him: “Mister Sneaky? H7
According to Ari Ben-Menashe, Davies, like Maxwell, worked on behalf of
Mossad, having been recruited in the 1970s from Strategic Intelligence Services, a
British intelligence front led by a Special Air Service veteran named Anthony
Pearson./8 By the 1980s, Davies — with Maxwell's knowledge — was using his
Daily Mirror duties to act as a cover for his involvement in Mossad-sanctioned
arms trafficking.

Besides the Mirror, Davies also acted as the manager and representative of the
Ora Group, “an Israeli company based in London” H? Headquartered at Davies’
London home, Ora was set up with the aid of Ari Ben-Menashe, and operated as a
key node in global arms flows. Among the “clients” that received arms — in this
case weapons from the Soviet bloc — with the help of Davies and Ora was
GMT." In his book Profits of War, Ben-Menashe reprinted a number of internal
documents illustrating the role played that Davies played in these affairs, including
communications between Ora and GMT.24

Davies vigorously denied the allegations made by Ben-Menashe, and the Daily
Mirror made a number of counter-allegations, including the charge that the
documents in question were forgeries. Another contested claim was that Davies
had traveled to Ohio to meet with arms dealers.12* Davies went out of his way to
claim that he had never been to Ohio, yet this was quickly proven to be false by

various journalists.” Likewise, the British Observer turned up other Ora-related

documents, which included a telex from Davies to “renowned American arms
merchant, Richard J. Breneke [sic]? Brenneke, as discussed in this chapter,
managed an offshore financial apparatus utilized by the American and Israeli
intelligence assets active in Operation Black Eagle. Brenneke would later state that
he had met Davies, but did not know that he was involved with the Daily
Mirror +5

Like all other shadow companies and strange entities that surrounded the
Enterprise and Robert Maxwellľ’s broader network, GMT was involved with the
complicated world of offshore banking. To carry out their operations, Studley
called on the services of Jean de la Giroday, a managing director at Geneva’s
Banque Cantrade, itself a subsidiary of Union Bank of Switzerland with branches
in Geneva and on the Isle of Jersey. Together, Studley and Giroday set up a
company called Consulentia Ltd; GMT’s principals were told to avoid
maintaining records of this company’s existence. Consulentia is just one of the
many enduring mysteries of this intricate web: while GMT’s Consulentia was set
up in 1984, Robert Vesco stated that, when he was looting IOS, he utilized the
“Consulentia sub of Banque Cantrade” in 1970.

In summer 1985, GMT was involved in the acquisition of arms on behalf of
the Contras. According to the chronology published by the National Security
Archives, Studley and Singlaub arranged “a $5 million shipment of AK-47 and
RPG grenade launchers from Europe to Honduras onboard a 15,000-ton Greek
flag freighter”!2° The arms may have been sourced from Eastern Bloc countries
like Poland or Bulgaria, as Studley wrote to North in October of that year,
“vociferously complaining that another arms dealer, Mario [Delamico], who was
associated with the Florida arms dealer Ron Martin, was essentially horning in on
their sources of Soviet-style armaments? 17

Several months after the October letter, in late December 1985, Studley and
Gen. Daniel Graham - the vice chairman of Singlaub’s US Council for World
Freedom and a close associate of CAUSA, the political arm of the Unification
Church — attended a meeting with CIA director Casey. An unnamed CIA officer
who was present at this meeting was asked by Congressional investigators if the
meeting had involved a discussion of a complicated three-way trading scheme,
developed by GMT as a means of sustaining finances and equipment for covert
operations. The investigators described this scheme as “a circular arrangement in

which a trading company would be established to supply freedom fighter
movements which Congress was unwilling to support for one reason or another.
... Israel would sell certain things, military equipment, to the People’s Republic of
China, who would supply Soviet arms, which would then be brokered.... Israel
would be benefited by the United States through a high technology support or
other compensation” +28

A schematic outline of this trading arrangement that was entered into
evidence shows the destination for the arms sourced from China. They would
go to US-backed rebels in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. GMT,
in other words, was proposing the creation of a multinational economic
arrangement that would bind together the US, Israel, and China through a series
of credit extensions, technology transfers, and arms deals.

It is quite possible that this was the ultimate plan for what the Enterprise was
intended to become, though the official narrative holds that this arrangement was
never completed. It seems clear that certain elements of the plan did go into
motion. Israel and China intensified economic and political relations in the 1980s
and both actively collaborated with the US in covert operations. Chief among
these was the arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Jeffrey Epstein was later
alleged to have been involved in such arms deals, specifically those involving the
Mujahideen. It appears that he may have facilitated major facets of something very
similar to GMT’s US-Israel-China plan in collaboration with members of the
Clinton White House, Chinese weapons firms and Southern Air Transport in the
mid to late 1990s (more on this in chapter 17).

GMT'’s other claim to fame was that it appears to have been involved in some
of the very first arm deals with Iran, ones that predated the Enterprise’s formation
but took place alongside the CIA-Mossad relationship during Operation Black
Eagle. The plan was a swap: “trade 200 tanks for Irans US-built F-14 fighter
aircraft,” which had been sold to Iran in the 1970s.1°2 Per this plan, Israel would
have served as a cut-out for the tanks. It is quite possible that the scheme
originated on the Israeli side of GMT. According to Alan Block, it was the first
thing that Ron Harel had been involved with when he joined the company.

It is also possible that this was the groundwork for later arms-for-hostages
arrangements. GMT worked closely with Israel Aircraft Industries (LAI), a major
defense contractor for the Israeli military discussed previously in chapter 3. The
founder of Israel Aircraft Industries, Adolph “Al” Schwimmer, had been heavily

involved in weapons arrangements with Iran during the rule of the shah, and these
arrangements had continued in secret after the Islamic Revolution. According to
many press reports, it was Schwimmer who first concocted the idea to trade arms

in exchange for the (attempted) release of hostage William Buckley.*+

EDMOND SAFRA’S FUNNY BANK

esides BCCI and Credit Suisse, another set of banks utilized by the Enterprise

were Republic National Bank, headquartered in New York City, and Trade

Development Bank, headquartered in Geneva and sold to American Express
in 1983. Both of these banks were controlled by Edmond Safra, a Lebanese-
Brazilian businessman who hailed from a long line of bankers. By the early 1990s,
Safra was a billionaire, with Republic National among the five largest banks in
New York. Both Safra and his bank, however, were dogged by controversy. Safra
himself died under suspicious circumstances after his bank was implicated in
large-scale money laundering and the possible theft of “stabilization credits”
provided by the IMF to a financially devastated, post-Soviet Russia.

A decade earlier, Republic National Bank was named — but never indicted — as
having participated in a money-laundering network called “La Mina,’ which was
the subject of a sweeping federal investigation called Operation Polar Cap.1%2 La
Mina, which washed money for Colombian drug cartels, was composed of a
circular daisy chain of banks, mines, gold refineries, precious metal brokers, and
jewelry stores and provided the financial infrastructure for “airplane
manufacturers and fixed-base operators” as well as “aircraft used to ferry drugs.”433

Unsurprisingly, one of the banks that factored into the La Mina daisy chain
was BCCI. Elsewhere, Safra’s Trade Development Bank did business with loyal
customers of BCCI such as Altaf Nazerali, a high-flyer in the world of securities
fraud. 134

Trade Development Bank and Republic National Bank are discussed in the
fourteenth chapter of the Congressional report on Iran-Contra.+* There,
Republic National is described as having “handled many of the Enterprise’s wire
transfers.” Besides these sorts of transfers, the bank was further involved in a
clandestine cash delivery system that took place “outside bank channels.” Nan
Morabia, an officer at Republic National's International Division, her husband
Elliot, and their son David were utilized by the Enterprise's money manager,

Willard Zucker, to “make cash drops to Hakim, Secord, and others on their
behalf.”8° Zucker would contact the Morabias with the amount required and tell
them which individual the money was intended for. Then, that amount was
deposited in an account at Trade Development Bank under the name “Codelis.”
Sometimes, the money drops would take place at Republic National Bank itself.
On at least one occasion, Robert Owen received $7,000 from Morabia at the bank
in New York City.

Nan Morabia’s FBI 302 (i.e., summary of the FBI’s interview with her) states
that she had known Zucker for “approximately 8 to 10 years” and that his “account
at [Republic National] was already established when she began working in the
International section”! She added that CSF maintained accounts at Trade
Development Bank and that Safra had “contact with Zucker in Geneva.” She was
not able to identify to the FBI, however, any potential business relations between
Safra and Zucker, although she made clear that she assumed that such business
did actually take place.

Yet, there were direct business relations between Republic National and CSF
that were separate from — but by no means unconnected to — the Enterprise. In the
summer of 1985, for example, CSF organized a Geneva-based company on behalf

of Republic National called Republic New York Corporation Air Transport
138

Services S.A.—>* The purpose of this company was to maintain a private aircraft on
behalf of Safra’s bank. At the end of 1985, the ownership of the plane was
transferred out of the CSF-managed company to a Swiss aviation company called
Aeroleasing S.A., which continued to maintain the plane on behalf of Republic
National.

Aeroleasing was one of the aviation companies contracted by the Enterprise
to ferry personnel around the world for various purposes. The Enterprise's
expenditure lists included in the Congressional Iran-Contra final report show that,
under a section titled “Mid-East (Iran Arms),” a total of $226,998 had been paid
to the company. The ultimate costs were likely much higher. In his testimony,
Secord stated, “We owe an aeroleasing firm in Europe, I am told, about $60,000.
Something like that. We still owe the firm Southern Air Transport, here in the
United States, quite a bit of money. I think it is something just under $100,000.
We can’t pay them.”82

Gordon Thomas, in his biography of Robert Maxwell, states that Safra and
Maxwell had enjoyed a long-lasting friendship. They particularly enjoyed, Thomas

writes, dining “on board the Lady Ghislaine when the yacht berthed opposite
Safras home in Monte Carlo.’“° Their relationship was not all pleasure, however.
According to Thomas, Safra allowed Maxwell to use Republic National Bank
accounts to launder money coming from Eastern Europe.

When Maxwell was active in the Eastern Bloc, his primary base of operations
was Bulgaria. There, as will be noted in more detail in chapter 9, Maxwell was
deeply involved in the thorny Cold War issue of tech transfers — the often-illicit
movement of high technology from the West to the Soviet sphere. This likely
brought him into contact with Kintex, a state-owned trading company that had
been organized by the Darzhhavna Sigurnost, the Bulgarian intelligence apparatus
that was closely aligned with and ultimately answerable to the KGB. A CIA report
on Kintex said it was a “central coordinator” of smuggling activities, with a
“clandestine charter” to facilitate smuggling for Arab and Balkan drugs and arms
traffickers and to “collect items of science and technology interest in the West.’+4

Kintex was more than willing to deal arms to right-wing insurgencies as much
as left-wing ones, with clients including those who opposed Soviet-backed forces.
These included the Christian Falangists of Lebanon, the Grey Wolves of Turkey,
and even the Contras of Nicaragua. Also closely tied to Kintex was Mohammed
Shakarchi, a prominent Geneva-based currency trader and the owner of Shakarchi
Trading. Shakarchi, who from his offices near the Zurich airport ran “the most
sophisticated currency exchange and commodity trading operations in
Switzerland” and courted state officials in Soviet-allied Bulgaria while being, at the
same time, involved in the CIAs covert support for the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan. Between 1981 and 1989, a CIA front company called Argin
purchased millions of dollars’ worth of rare currencies from Shakarchi, which
were sold to raise money for the rebels.“

One of Shakarchi’s US partners was Capcom, a commodity-futures firm that
“was created by the former head of BCCI’s Treasury Department ... who
capitalized it with funds from BCCI and BCCI customers” 13 This wasn’t the only
familiar face engaging in funny banking with Shakarchi. A classified DEA report
stated that Shakarchi’s currency-exchange services were “utilized by some of the
world’s largest trafficking organizations to launder the proceeds of their drug-
trafficking activities” and that part of his network included accounts at Safra’s
Republic National Bank.“ Mohammed Shakarchi’s father, Mahmoud, was
reportedly close to Safra.

Safra’s name can also be found in Jeffrey Epstein’s contact book, though the
banker’s last name is misspelled as “Saffra.” There are two phone numbers listed
for Safra and no addresses. Another individual in the book with ties to Safra, albeit
through a rather circuitous route, is Michael de Picciotto. Picciotto, who had five
phone numbers listed in Epstein’s contact book, has been associated with Engel &
Volkers, the massive German real estate company and, since 2020, has served on
the board of Aston Martin. He got his start, however, working at Union Bancaire
Privée, a Swiss bank controlled by his family. He had joined as the managing
director for their London offices in 1988 and eventually became “responsible for
UBP’s global financial activities.’“*

Union Bancaire Privée began life as Compagnie de Banque et
d’Investissements of Geneva, founded by Edgar de Picciotto. Edgar, the uncle of
Michael de Picciotto, came from a family with a long history in both banking and
European diplomacy. The Picciotto family was fairly close to the Safras, and like
Edmond Safra, Edgar de Picciotto was born in Lebanon. As their respective
banking enterprises bloomed, the two became friends. In the late 1980s, when
American Express disposed of Trade Development Bank, the Geneva bank that
had formerly belonged to Safra, it was Edgar who bought it44° The merger of
Trade Development Bank and Compagnie de Banque et d’Investissements led to
its reformation into Union Bancaire Privée.

Edgar de Picciotto was also, according to SEC filings, a member of the board
of advisors to Quantum Industrial Holdings, a division of the complicated
investment network of George Soros. Quantum Industrial Holdings held the
majority of the shares of Quantum Industrial Partners, one of the advisors to
which was George Soros’ brother Paul Soros. Paul’s son, Peter Soros, appears in
Epstein’s black book with addresses in New York City and London and ten phone
numbers.

Another item appearing in Epstein’s notebook that ties into this network is
Aeroleasing. Both of Epstein’s books contain lists for the aviation company, for
both its Geneva and Zurich locations.

THE MAINLAND SAVINGS CONNECTION

hen US arms began flowing to Iran at the end of August 1985, it was Adnan
Khashoggi who advanced the initial capital - through his BCCI bank

accounts — to put the thrust of the plan in motion. The initial “bridge financing”
was $1 million, followed shortly thereafter by an additional $4 million“
Khashoggi subsequently claimed that this $5 million, “plus an additional $2.5
million whose purpose was unclear” came from a loan provided by Roland “Tiny”
Rowland, the well-heeled British tycoon, corporate raider, and member of the
Clermont Club who was briefly discussed in the last chapter. While Rowland’s
connection to Iran-Contra affair is well documented — and will be discussed
shortly — he denied the validity of Khashoggi’s claims.

While this denial might simply be a case of Rowland trying to put distance
between himself and the affair, it happens that shortly prior to the initiation of the
arms transfers, Khashoggi came into $5 million via a surprising route: Mainland
Savings, a Houston-based savings and loan. Mainland Savings, one of the S&Ls
that collapsed spectacularly over the course of the 1980s, was plugged into a wider
network of crooked land developers, organized crime associates, and other
denizens of the murky world of covert operations.

Khashoggi’s ties to Mainland Savings dated back to 1977, when Mario Renda,
an ambitious New Yorker with dreams of wealth and power, stepped off a plane in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was then a partner in IPAD - the International Planners
and Developers Construction Consortium - that hoped to gain a lucrative
contract to build concrete homes in Jidda.48 Khashoggi, it was reasoned, would
be the key to unlocking the deep pockets of wealthy Saudis and, after a meeting
with Renda, the arms dealer committed himself to the venture. While IPAD’s
ambitions were ultimately never realized, it resulted in a long-lasting relationship
between Khashoggi and Renda.

After IPAD fizzled out, Renda leveraged the contacts he gained through his
introduction into Khashoggi’s inner circle and secured a position as the treasurer
of Arab International Bank. Interestingly, in 1973, this bank had formed a joint
venture with Lonrho, the corporate monolith controlled by Tiny Rowland.“
Arab International Bank’s specialty was certificates of deposits (CDs): it would
use vast petrodollar reserves to shop CDs around the world, seeking out the
locations that had the highest rates of return. Renda positioned himself front and
center in these efforts, which provided him with the idea for his next venture. In
1978, he returned to New York City and formed Arabas Inc., a “one-man firm” that

was intended to broker deposits, likely on behalf of Arab clients.°2

The timing was fortuitous. Against the backdrop of early 1980s deregulation
fever, Renda became connected to Martin Schwimmer. Schwimmer, rumored to
be a money-launderer for the Lucchese crime family, managed the pension funds
for several New York unions, including Teamsters Local 810, which was
reportedly close to organized crime interests.*+ A plan was then hatched: Renda
and Schwimmer would begin brokering deposits of union pension fund money
into S&Ls across the United States, collecting along the way commissions from
lending institutions and fees from the unions. Arabas was renamed First United
Fund, and soon Renda and Schwimmer were moving billions into a string of
savings and loans.

By the end of the decade, Renda and Schwimmer had deposited money in 130
S&Ls, all of which collapsed. Rendas CDs were linked directly to massive
borrowing at each of these institutions, which were generally unpaid. In addition,
quite frequently, the borrowing was carried out by an interlinked network of
organized crime associates. That collusion was undeniable. Besides the
accusations of Schwimmer’s involvement with the Lucchese family, Renda was
rumored to have “controlled a lot of money being loaned for the benefit of Paul
Castellano,’ the powerful head of the Gambino family and, until 1985, the
chairman of the Commission, the Mafia’s governing body.+ Notably, Castellano
was one of several organized crime figures who were clients of Roy Cohn.+53

Khashoggi stayed close to Renda throughout these developments. One
notable example of this involved a mobster by the name of Lawrence Iorizzo, the
president of the mob-linked Vantage Petroleum Company. Iorizzo was close to
Martin Carey, the brother of New York governor Hugh Carey and oilman Edward
Carey. Vantage had taken over Carey’s Petroleum Combustion International,
which by that point had already carried out numerous dealings with Iorizzo.
Iorizzo would later testify that Martin Carey had been involved in bootlegging
gasoline with him and that the profits from these operations had been funneled
into Hugh Carey’s re-election campaigns.+54

Iorizzo, in other words, was clearly politically connected, and this was what
had caught Renda’s attention. Renda had wanted to help Khashoggi, who at the
time was struggling to get the proper permits to build a helicopter landing pad at
his home just outside New York City. An associate of Renda by the name of Leslie
Winkler “told Iorizzo that ... Renda might be able to assist Iorizzo in getting a fat
oil contract if Iorizzo used his powers of ‘persuasion’ in New York to help

Khashoggi.... Renda said if Iorizzo could ‘remove these obstacles, Khashoggi
would be most appreciative” !$$

At the same time that they were concocting a way to get Khashoggi’s helipad
up and running, Renda and Iorizzo agreed to embark on a classic bank bust-out
scheme, akin to what Renda and Schwimmer were doing with the savings and
loans. Renda would make deposits at a bank, which would then make loans to a
Panamanian shell company controlled by Iorizzo — loans that would never be
repaid.1*° The shell company that Iorizzo used was called Houston Holdings, and
it had been purchased by Iorizzo from Steven Sandor Samos, a lawyer who
maintained a lucrative trade in off-the-shelf Panamanian companies.*~ Iorizzo
and Samos had been introduced by Renda’s friend Leslie Winkler, and one of
Samos’ primary business associates was a Florida banker named Ray Corona - the
partner of Leonard Pelullo in Sunshine State Bank.+58

Samos also made an appearance in the Iran-Contra affair. Southern Air
Transport purchased a Panamanian company called Amalgamated Commercial
Enterprises, which it used to “purchase and maintain planes carrying supplies to
the contras.’°2 ACE was one of Samos’ off-the-shelf companies, and all of the
company’s officers were employed by International Management and Trust Corp.,
a company run by Samos. Another noteworthy link involves how ACE utilized
bank accounts at the Banco de Iberoamerica, a location that Samos was accused of
using as a conduit for drug money laundering.® Banco de Iberoamerica was a
subsidiary of the Arab Banking Corporation, a major international bank
headquartered in Bahrain that offered floating rate notes on the open market on
behalf of BCCI2%

Among the S&Ls where Renda and Schwimmer were brokering deposits of
union pension fund money was Houston’s Mainland Savings. This same S&L
became embroiled in a series of overly complicated financial transactions with
Khashoggi and a slew of business partners, the origins of which go back to
1974.162 That was when Khashoggi purchased a large tract of property adjacent to
the Galleria, a major shopping hub in downtown Houston that had been
developed with the aid of the Marcos family of the Philippines. Khashoggi acted
as front man for Imelda Marcos on more than one occasion.1& Khashoggi let the
land sit bare until 1979, when he was joined by Clint Murchison Jr., scion of the
Dallas oil family. With $15 million in financing courtesy of Texas Commerce
Bank, the pair embarked on an ambitious development plan.

The plans never came to fruition and, three years later, Murchison exited the
scheme. Khashoggi began looking for buyers for the land and began cooking up
other real estate schemes. One of these was in Aspen, Colorado, where he and a
developer named John Roberts planned to purchase property using a $44 million
loan from Commerce Savings, plus an additional $14 million from San Jacinto
Savings. In a now-obvious pattern, this money disappeared into the black void of
Khashoggi’s finances. What was left was a staggering debt owed to a string of
banks and S&Ls.

Mainland Savings, flush with deposits from Khashoggi’s friend Mario Renda,
offered an ambitious way out of these problems by purchasing Khashoggi’s
Galleria-adjacent property for the grossly inflated sum of $68 million dollars. Of
this, $22 million would be put up by Mainland itself, with the remainder provided
by a loan from Austin-based Lamar Savings. The plan was: “The $30 million in
prior loans from Texas Commerce Bank and San Jacinto Savings would be paid
off. Khashoggi would buy $10 million in preferred stock at Mainland and use $12
million as a down payment to buy foreclosed loans real estate (called ‘cash for
trash’), thus boosting its capital and keeping regulators at bay. That left $16 million
for miscellaneous costs and Khashoggi” 164

A problem arose when Mainland could only get Khashoggi’s property valued
at $55 million, short of the $68 million that they had originally hoped for. They
were able to inflate the loan up to $58 million, which covered most of the debts
and miscellaneous costs — except for the $10 million that was to be used by
Khashoggi to buy Mainland stock and bad assets. Luckily for Mainland,
Khashoggi had additional properties next to the Galleria-adjacent tract in
question, which he had financed through S&L borrowing. Khashoggi was issued
lines of credit by Mainland that were marked for developing those properties, but
they were actually used to cover the missing $10 million. But there was something
else: “On the same day, Mainland signed a $5 million letter of credit to
Khashoggi.”1°

The deal between Mainland and Khashoggi over these lines of credit was
reached on August 1, 1985, just weeks before the arms transfers to Iran were
underway. These transfers, of course, relied on a $5 million advance from
Khashoggi. As Pete Brewton notes, the $5 million line of credit from Mainland
vexed regulators and attracted the attention of the FBI. It was then discovered that
Mainland’s executives had worked to conceal it from the S&Ls board of directors.

Khashoggi later denied that the $5 million came from Mainland, instead claiming
that Tiny Rowland had been the source of the funds. However, as mentioned,
Rowland denied this. Mainland, for its part, insisted the money was a guarantee to
Khashoggi for his purchase of $10 million in Mainland stock — $10 million, it
must be reiterated, that was coming from Mainland itself.

It might be tempting to write the Mainland events off as a curiosity, another
dead end in the hall of mirrors that is the Iran-Contra affair. There are, however,
other ties between Mainland and Lamar Savings — the institution that loaned
Mainland the bulk of the money for the Khashoggi deal — and the netherworld of
BCCI and intelligence agencies. Besides Khashoggi, one of the major borrowers at
both of these savings and loans was Mounzer Hourani, a Lebanese-American from
Utah with extensive interests in Texas real estate1°° Hourani might have had
intelligence connections. “A former high-ranking officer at Lamar Savings,” writes
Brewton, “said that Hourani claimed to have ties to the Mossad” 167

Ties to Israeli intelligence or not, Hourani was certainly linked to Utah's Orrin
Hatch, who, as mentioned, was tightly connected to BCCI and to First American.
Hatch stated that he had known Hourani “from the mid-1980s and was partly
based on their shared devotion to the Mormon faith”!®2 Hourani, meanwhile,
told NBC News’ Mark Hosenball that he had joined with Hatch and BCCI insider
Mohammed Hammoud on “various private schemes to free US hostages held by
terrorists in Lebanon” 162

In 1986, Hourani was in hot water over his borrowing at Mainland, which by
that point had collapsed and had been taken over by the Federal SavingS&Loan
Insurance Corporation. Hatch appears to have tried to intervene directly, penning
a letter to the federal institution stating that a possible “resolution” could be found
with respect to Hourani’s problems.+ Four years later, as BCCI began to fumble
toward collapse, Hatch once again acted as Hourani’s lobbyist. He reached out to
the beleaguered bank requesting that they lend money to Hourani for a series of
real estate ventures in Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas. Hourani himself then sent
a proposal for financing. It is not clear if any proposed loans were ever actually
provided.

Hatch has one more connection to figures in this saga. In 1985, during the
peak of his Mainland borrowing and the initiation of the Iran weapons sales,
Khashoggi arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, with grand plans to build “two gold-
colored 43 story office towers that would dwarf the nearby Mormon Church office

building, the tallest structure in town” Khashoggi had been a presence in Salt

Lake City since the 1970s, and this increased significantly during the 1980s. Yet,
by 1987, construction on the towers had been abandoned and Khashoggi had fled
Utah, leaving numerous unpaid loans and broken promises in his wake.

It was during this period, Hatch stated, that he had met Khashoggi. Details on
their relationship are scarce, but, according to Hatch, their association was the

senator “extending the courtesies he would to any big investor in Utah? 123

“A PAN-EUROPEAN PLOT”

key aspect of the covert operations of the Reagan era that is frequently

overlooked is that, with respect to the complex trafficking of arms to Iran,
Oliver North and the Enterprise were dipping their toes into a much wider swamp
of political and economic corruption, arms trafficking, and money laundering on a
truly colossal scale. As the conflict between Iraq and Iran heated up, companies,
banks, intelligence agents, and smugglers poured arms and military materials into
both sides of a bloody war.

Despite laws barring such activities, the conflict in the Middle East was a
boom time for many. For instance, there was the so-called powder cartel, a “pan-
European plot” to move propellant powder for artillery and other armaments to
Iran At the top of this cartel was Bofors-Nobel, the Swedish arms combine that
is now the Swedish subdivision of the massive UK-based defense contractor BAE
Systems. Bofors had a close relationship with Iran that predated the revolution. In
the early 1970s, the company entered into a business agreement with the country
to build an armaments factory. Relations between the two were suspended
following the revolution. However, a dip in Bofors’ balance sheet, a product of the
downsizing of the Swedish military, led the company to embark on the lucrative
path of embargo busting.

Moving propellant powder to Iran required numerous partners, complicit
shipping agents, and payoffs to officials. The primary mechanism for coordinating
this network was the European Association for the Study of Safety Problems in
the Production and Use of Propellant Powders, a public relations group organized
and set up by Bofors and other European weapons manufacturers following a

175

series of disastrous plant explosions.~~ This provided a convenient cover for these

various arms merchants to come together, arrange the logistics for weapons
orders, disperse the proceeds, and even inflate prices of their wares.

The Bofors powder cartel made extensive use of Italian companies for
arranging shipping and payments. Soon, Italy had become the primary locus of
this subterranean arms trade. In an October 1990 exposé in Euro-money magazine,
the role of the French arms manufacturer Luchaire in the trafficking of arms to
Iran was dissected.12° Luchaire had two subsidiaries based in Italy, SEA and
Consar, which were used to arrange the movement of weapons through the
Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. The ships would log false destinations
and then make their way to Iran via secret routes. The arms loaded on these ships
were not only sourced from Luchaire, as SEA and Consar acted as intermediaries
for numerous European companies involved in the trade.

One such firm was Defarm, which was actively collaborating with Bofors in
the illicit movement of propellant powder. The founder of Defarm was Nicola
Dubini, who had cofounded Consar before he sold it to Luchaire. Another firm
was a Portuguese arms brokerage called Defex, described in testimony as having a
“close relationship” with Richard Secord, after having been introduced by Thomas
Clines.+4 It became one of the companies utilized by the Enterprise. According to
Albert Hakim, Defex sourced weapons from Eastern Bloc arms manufacturers and
merchants, which were then purchased and resold to the Contras.

Behind these moves were various European banks, some shadowy and others
well known. On the shadowy side, there was International Bankers Incorporated,
which issued lines of credit to SEA and Consar. The Italian branch of
International Bankers Incorporated was located in a building owned by the
scandal-plagued Banco Ambrosiano, which had been set up by Jean-Maxime
Lévéque in 1982. Lévéque had previously been the president of Crédit
Commercial de France, a sizable French bank that, incidentally, had lent Adnan
Khashoggi large sums for his Salt Lake City ventures.8° The major shareholders
of International Bankers Incorporated included the Saudi businessman Akram
Ojjeh, a friend of Adnan Khashoggi’s, and Robert Maxwell.+81

More well-known was the French merchant bank Banque Worms, which was
nationalized by the Mitterand government in 1982. During the period when the
French state owned the bank, it held 23 percent of Luchaire and aided in financing

the flow of arms and powder® Joining Banque Worms in these efforts was a

renowned Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. The interactions were
complex, as R. T. Naylor has described in Patriots and Profiteers:

Bank Melli [the Iranian bank handling their side of the financing] would order its Italian
correspondent banks to issue LCs [lines of credit] on behalf of Luchaire’s Italian subsidiaries,
which sent them to Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.... BNL would use the original LCs as
security to issue their own LCs in favour of the Luchaire parent firm in France. That firm sent
the LCs to Banque Worms for negotiation. When the goods were loaded up on board ships,
Banque Worms would present its LCs to BNL for payment, and BNL would do likewise with
the correspondent banks of Bank Melli. The use of back-to-back letters of credit was a simple but

effective device for breaking up the money trail 183

London was another major hub for these activities, with various arms
merchants playing a role in the flow of weapons as far back as 1981. Chief among
these were Ben Banerjee, an arms dealer and owner of BR&W Industries, and his
close associates Michael and Leslie Aspin. According to Die Welt, Banerjee and
Michael Aspin were involved in negotiations between Oliver North and several
representatives from the Iranian government in 1984 over the sale of $264 million
worth of TOW missiles. Subsequently, evidence was entered as part of a British
court case that showed that Banerjee’s BR&W Industries did indeed attempt to
move 1,250 TOW missiles to Iran, which were obscured in customs invoices as
“lift trucks.”184

These customs invoices were handled by BCCI, and they were “accompanied
by telexes and letters on BCCI stationary of a nature and type ordinarily used by
BCCI, showing BCCI providing counter guarantees and letters of credit involving
the ‘lift trucks””85 What is more, according to Michael Aspin’s brother, Leslie,
these TOW missile sales were indeed part of North's operation. Leslie Aspin
further claimed that he and North had opened three joint bank accounts at the
Paris branch of BCCI to launder money for these sales and that one of these
accounts was under the name “Devon Island.” The Senate subcommittee
investigating BCCI learned that BCCI Paris did indeed have a Devon Island
account, but they were unable to acquire internal documentation for this branch.

The use of suspect invoice techniques, such as classifying TOW missiles as
“lift trucks,” seemed to be a habit of Michael Aspin’s. In the early 1980s, he was
working closely with a British arms dealer named Leonard Hammond, who also
manufactured machine gun parts through his company, Delta Engineering.
Hammond and Aspin used Delta Engineering to move machine guns to the
Middle East and Africa, with a particular focus on South Africa. By 1981, they

were moving arms to Iran.1®° Frequently, these arms flows were mislabeled on
invoices as “hydraulic lifting tools.”

Aspin and Hammond had a particularly close relationship with Kuehne &
Nagel, a large German freight-and-logistics company.124 When the arms dealers
moved a thousand rifles to South Africa in 1980 — invoiced as “hi-lift hydraulic
machinery spares” — K & N’s subsidiary Air Cargo handled the freight. In 1981, K
& N worked with Aspin and Hammond in moving weapons destined for Iran. K
& N, according to Aspin, played a role very similar to that which BCCI would later
play in moving TOW missiles in 1984. He told Spiegel that “the management of
Kuehne & Nagel knew about the illegal arms transports, planned the routes with
necessary intermediaries, issued documents and change information.”1°2

In 1981, right as these operations were being developed, Kuehne & Nagel was
acquired by Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho.1®2 Were these two events connected? It is
impossible to say for sure, but there is reason to suspect that this was the case. As
previously mentioned, one Lonrho freight cargo subsidiary has been identified as
a participant in Edwin Wilson's covert activities in Libya on behalf of the Shackley
network. Lonrho obtained K & N shortly after the loss of that cargo company.

In addition to Italy and the UK, Belgium was a major node in this wide-
ranging European network. Of particular interest are the allegations made in the
ATLAS dossier, a confidential report drafted by the Belgian Gendarmerie in
November 1994. ATLAS makes a series of startling accusations concerning an
entity that they describe as “the Nebula” - a network of Belgian businessmen,
politicians, and criminals who were involved in arms trafficking, diamond
smuggling, drug running, and the like. At the center of the Nebula was Felix
Przedborski, a businessman and Belgian diplomat who, since 1978, lived in Costa
Rica, where he maintained dual citizenship.

There is a small, but steady stream of press reports independent of the ATLAS
dossier that have linked Przedborski to various forms of corruption. Notably, in
1978, Italian police found drugs in a vehicle belonging to the Costa Rican
embassy, with one of Przedborski’s employees at the wheel. That same year, one of
Przedborski’s close associates who was serving as Monaco’s diplomat to Costa
Rica, was arrested in connection with drug trafficking +22

When the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación published a series of articles
probing Przedborski’s connection to various criminal enterprises — based largely
on reports already published by European journalists - “Don Felix,’ as he was

known, responded litigiously. In the end, La Nación’s journalist, Herrera Ulloa,
was charged with criminal defamation and forced to pay Przedborski “a fine
equivalent to 120 days’ wages? 1%

The ATLAS dossier names numerous individuals in Przedborski’s network.
Among these were his son Daniel, a Geneva lawyer who was poised to take over
his father’s complex. Interestingly, Daniel Przedborski, from 1984 through 2019,
had worked at the law firm of Pierre Schifferli - Bruce Rappaport’s attorney who,
as mentioned, had been head of the World Anti-Communist League.
Documentation from several lawsuits suggests that Daniel worked directly on
some of Rappaport’s affairs.

These are not the only familiar faces that appear in the dossier. In a list of
banks used by the “Przedborski Group” for money laundering is Republic
National Bank, with a note beside it stating that “in this bank it is a certain Safra
who would be responsible for special transfers.”2* This, of course, refers to
Edmond Safra, thus directly linking the Przedborski Group to Contra support
operations and to Republic National. The ATLAS dossier further links the
Przedborski Group or Nebula to these support operations: “It is said that some of
the weapons of Irangate would have been transferred to the Contras of Nicaragua
by this network.”23

ATLAS identifies one of the lesser-known members of the Nebula as Bruno
Goldberger, a purported real estate broker from Brussels. It adds that Goldberger
worked “for a certain Globus Group,’ but the investigators who penned the
document stated that they were unfamiliar with this entity. This was likely the
Bulgarian state-owned trading company Globus. In Evil Money, Rachel Ehrenfeld
cites a DEA report from 1989 that states that Globus “was formerly known as
Kintex” — the Bulgarian firm tied to Safra’s friend Mohammed Shakarchi and,
possibly, Robert Maxwell. The DEA report states Ehrenfeld recounted that
“Globus transmitted Middle Eastern drug money to Switzerland via Shakarchi” +25

Przedborski’s time in Costa Rica overlapped with the country being used a
major hub for the Enterprise’s pro-Contra efforts. The ATLAS dossier charges
that, while he was serving a diplomat, Przedborski had embarked on a major
business venture: the construction of a “tourist real estate project” in the Santa
Elena region of Costa Rica.“ Intriguingly, North was also using the dense jungles
of Santa Elena as cover for secret airstrips that were used for Contra support

flights. +27

Other connections to the Enterprise’s operations can be seen via another bank
mentioned as being part of Przedborski’s network. This was Geoffrey’s Bank in
Belgium, described in the dossier as a conduit for arms-smuggling payments.
Geoffrey's Bank had also been intimately connected to some of Roy Cohn’s
suspect business activities (see chapter 4). Geoffrey's Bank was controlled by
Arno Newman, a friend of Cohn’s, and his son, Geoffrey, for whom the bank was
named. According to Belgian journalist Willy van Damme, the Newmans were
closely connected to Pierre Salik, a clothing manufacturer with close ties to Israel’s
Mossad.+?8 Salik, importantly, was named in the ATLAS dossier as a member of
Przedborski’s core group: it states that Salik’s daughters “were promised in
marriage to the two sons of Przedborski,” though this never took place for reasons
unknown.

A frequent visitor to Geoffrey’s Bank — and a close associate of both the
Newmans and Pierre Salik - was Jacques Monsieur, described as one of Europe's

biggest arms dealers.“

Like Salik, Monsieur was close to Israeli intelligence. For
instance, in 1986, Belgian authorities recovered documentation outlining his
contacts with both Mossad and Iran. When he was arrested in Turkey in 2002, in
part for having sold “embargoed American spare parts and aviation technology to
Iran,’ numerous press reports identified him as having been an active participant
in the Iran-Contra affair2™

Willy van Damme writes that Monsieur’s introduction to the world of arms
trafficking came through a partner of the Newmans named David Benelie. As
noted in chapter 4, David Benelie was really David Azulay, the brother of Avner
Azulay. Avner, a former Mossad agent, is best known as the business partner of
the notorious commodities dealer Marc Rich, who himself worked closely with
Israeli intelligence. Azulay was put in charge of the Marc Rich Foundation, the
philanthropic appendage of Rich’s empire. The foundation has maintained
outposts in Zug, Switzerland and in Israel.

Rich has other ties to individuals and entities that populate this netherworld.
There are rumors — albeit ones that are difficult to substantiate — that he was close
to fellow oil trader John Deuss, who retained the services of Ted Shackley while
Shackley was running his “private CIA? There are more demonstrable ties
between Rich and Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank and BCCI. In 1984, for
example, the Rothschild Bank in Zurich loaned Rich the astronomical sum of $50
million Swiss francs. The managing director of the bank at that time was Alfred

Hartmann, the money manager for Inter Maritime and a frequent BCCI front
202
man. ^=

To complete the circle, the report of the US inquiry into BCCI states:

Marc Rich remains one of the most important figures in international commodities markets,
and remains a fugitive from the United States following his indictment on securities fraud.
BCCI lending to Rich amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, Rich’s commodities
firms were used by BCCI in connection with BCCI’s involving in US guarantee programs
through the Department of Agriculture. The nature and extent of Rich's relationship with BCCI

requires further investigation, 223

Others named in the ATLAS dossier as involved in Przedborski-linked arms
trafficking suggested Przedborski’s group had close connections to the heights of
Belgian political power. Featuring prominently among these names was Paul
Vanden Boeynants, a meat-packing magnate who had been prime minister from
1966 to 1968 and again from 1978 to 1979. In the interim period, he served as
Belgium's defense minister, where he presided over a series of controversial arms
deals and a weapons buildup. An adamant cold warrior, Vanden Boeynants moved
among the webs spun by groups such as Le Cercle and the World Anti-
Communist League.

Vanden Boeynants had a particularly controversial relationship with Roger
Boas, another figure whose name appears extensively in the ATLAS dossier. Boas
oversaw the Belgian weapons manufacturer ASCO, which profited handsomely
during Vanden Boeynants’ years as defense minister. De Morgen reported that “as
soon as the politician came to Defense in 1972, his company had probably not
missed a single defense contract. ASCO ... saw its profits increase tenfold in the
1970s”? Many of these deals bore the unmistakable signs of corruption, and
allegations of bribes and kickbacks, embezzlement and money-laundering,
harassment and intimidation often followed in their wake.”

There were also the accusations that Vanden Boeynants and Boas made use of
a highly connected call girl ring headed by Fortuna Israel, better known as
“Madame Tuna.” According to De Morgen, Madame Tuna was placed on the
payroll of one of Boas’ ASCO subsidiaries, where her job title was listed as
“decorator”? This ring had connections to other familiar faces. Madame Tuna, it
seems, was also an associate of Adnan Khashoggi, who reportedly called upon her
services for help in obtaining lucrative contracts through subterfuge and
blackmail. Boas was reported to have been introduced to Khashoggi and Akram

Ojjeh - an investor, alongside Robert Maxwell, in International Bankers
Incorporated — by the madame herself.

A direct line between this network of connections and the early 1980s flow of
weapons to Iran may well exist. Named in the ATLAS dossier as a member of
Przedborski’s group was Abraham Shavit, Boas’ general manager at ASCO. The
dossier describes Shavit as the “right arm of Roger Boas”?® Shavit was well
connected in Israel. For instance, in the 1970s, he served as the president of the
Manufacturer’s Association of Israel and, afterward, had a stint as the chairman of
El Al, Israel’s chief airline company that was involved in CIA-Mossad airlifts in the
1980s, including Operation Moses, and has also operated as a front company for
Israeli intelligence. He was also reportedly a former Israeli intelligence officer and
a close associate of Manuel J. Pires, a ClA-employed arms trafficker.*% Pires
would later be identified as one of the Enterprise’s middlemen in the Iranian arm
sales.

Prior to the Enterprise’s operations, in January 1983, ASCO’s Malta branch
was involved in the transfer of “aircraft parts, weapons and ammunition” to Iran
via a contact at Bank Melli.2 Two ASCO Malta invoices for these show that the
shipments were underwritten with a line of credit from BCCI’s branch on
Brompton Road in London. According to Gary Sick, one of ASCO’s liaisons to
Iran for these types of arrangements was the arms dealer Hushang Lavi — one of
the witnesses who claimed to have inside knowledge of William Casey’s October

Surprise activities.212

GUNS FOR IRAQ.

Sport for the Iran weapons arrangements was not universal within the

Reagan administration and dissenting voices rippled through the corridors of
powers. While such dissenters were unable to stop the virtually uncontrollable
cascade of events, many of these individuals used the fallout from the scandal to
concentrate their political power. Chief among these was George P. Shultz,
President Reagan's Secretary of State. During the inquiry into the activities of the
Enterprise, Shultz turned over significant documentation to investigators and
provided detailed testimony. The official Iran-Contra report states that Shultz
used the opportunity afforded by the scandal to “to regain control over
counterterrorism policy. Following a strenuous bureaucratic struggle, Shultz

persuaded President Reagan to prohibit arms transfers to Iran and to announce
that the Department of State would take the lead on such counterterrorism and
diplomatic matters in the future”*4

Shultz testified that he only had fragmentary knowledge of the arms sales and
that he had learned fairly late that they had taken place. Senate investigators found,
however, that Shultz was far more knowledgeable about what was taking place
than he had initially let on. Likewise, he had knowledge of the Iran sales far earlier
than what he testified. Nonetheless, the record showed that his opposition to the
sales was consistent. What is not mentioned, however, is that Shultz had interests
involving Iran's bitter enemy — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Early on in his tenure as secretary of state, Shultz dispatched Donald
Rumsfeld, who at the time was working as an executive in the private sector, to
Iraq to meet with Saddam. The first of these meetings took place in December
1983, with a follow-up meeting in March 1984. Declassified documents illustrate
the purpose of the visits was to move the US and Iraq toward normalizing
relations, despite official condemnations of Saddam’s use of chemical weapons.

Shultz, however, had other things on his mind when he dispatched Rumsfeld.
Before he had become Secretary of State, Shultz had been an executive at the
construction giant Bechtel. Prior to Bechtel, he had served in multiple positions in
the Nixon administration, first as Labor Secretary, then as the Director of the
Office of Management and Budget, and finally as Treasury Secretary. He was
not the only Bechtel figure high up within the Reagan administration. Caspar
Weinberger, who had served alongside Shultz in Nixon’s OMB, had also moved to
Bechtel. Shultz and Weinberger carried on a multi-decade feud that spilled over
into the Reagan administration. Weinberger, unlike Shultz, was a major booster of
the Enterprise and had played a role in the Iran weapons transfers.

Bechtel, in the early 1980s, had launched an ambitious, multibillion-dollar
project in the Middle East that sought to establish an oil pipeline that would move
crude from Kirkuk, Iraq to the port of Aqaba, Jordan, on the banks of the Red Sea.
A now-declassified memo from Rumsfeld, sent to the State Department during his
December 1983 trip stated that he had “raised the question of a pipeline through
Jordan. He [Saddam] said he was familiar with the proposal. However, he was
concerned about the proximity to Israel as the pipeline would enter the Gulf of
Agqaba.”24

Weighing heavily on Saddam's mind was Israels Operation Opera in June
1981, when Israeli military aircraft bombed an unfinished nuclear power plant.
The Iraqis would be on the hook for sizable loans connected to Bechtel’s project,
and the possibility that Israel might destroy the pipeline would place a major
burden on Iraq’s wartime finances.

The Bechtel pipeline negotiations became something of a boondoggle, rife
with subterfuge and intrigue. It intersected in odd ways with the Iran-Contra
project, and formed something of a parallel — if not an entirely opposing -
operation. In the spring of 1984, Iraq and Jordan agreed to grant Bechtel a
contract for pipeline construction that was dependent on several conditions.
These included $500 million in financing from the US government; an agreement
that American oil companies would take a sizable chunk of the oil moved by the
pipeline; and that not only Bechtel, but American banks and the Export-Import
Bank, would be involved in the guarantees for the project. As Alan Block points
out, the rationale for these demands was simple: put the US government and
American businesses on the hook for the project, and they would act as a buffer
against Israel.

The agreement operated smoothly until Iraq made an additional demand. It
wanted “a ‘force majeure clause’ that would free Iraq from its obligation to pay
interest on construction loans in the event of Israeli aggression”?! With this
demand threatening to derail the whole project, an interesting figure interjected
himself into the middle of the negotiations: Bruce Rappaport, Casey's good friend
and a BCCI insider. Interestingly, one of the directors of Rappaport’s Inter
Maritime Bank, until 1979, had been a former consultant for Bechtel.

Rappaport wanted a discount on oil transported by the pipeline in exchange
for guarantees from Shimon Peres that Israel would leave the pipeline alone. To
sweeten the deal, Rappaport was prepared to grant Israel a portion of his profits
from this oil deal. The deal with Israel would require two elements: a written
security guarantee and an insurance fund for the pipeline set up by Israel. Israel,
through Rappaport’s intercession, agreed to the former but not the latter, and so
the tanker magnate reached out to the Reagan administration for leverage over
Israel. He turned to two attorneys he was close to, Samuel Pisar — the powerful
attorney whose client list has included Armand Hammer and Robert Maxwell -
and E. Robert Wallach. Wallach, in turn, brought Rappaport to the attention of
Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese. Meese, in turn, managed to bring the

National Security Council into the mix, which believed that US government
entities like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation could be used to
organize the insurance fund.

Several years of torturous negotiations began, with Rappaport acting as a back
channel between the US and Israel. One letter, written by Peres, was passed from
Rappaport to Wallach to Meese and stated that the Israeli politician would discuss
the matter with Shultz himself. It was ultimately for naught. The NSC backed out
of the project under the leadership of Admiral John Poindexter, curiously one of
Oliver North's chief allies and a major player in the movement of arms to Iran.

Despite this failure, in 1986, Rappaport received a sizable sum of money.
Shultz concocted a plan to elicit a $10 million donation from the Sultan of Brunei
for the Contras. Elliot Abrams was dispatched to handle the money transfer, and
he provided an account number at Credit Suisse bank in Geneva for the deposit. It
was presented as an account for the Enterprise’s Lake Resources, but when the
money was transferred, it ended up in an account controlled by Rappaport. It was
later written off as a mistake, with several numbers in the account flipped around
and thus “coincidentally” depositing the money with Rappaport. Rappaport, for
his part, would deny that he ever received the money — though some of his top
personnel, as well as Bert Lance, later told Alan Block that Rappaport had indeed
received the funds. Lance stated that the money was used for “pay-ofts,” while
Jerry Townsend - a CIA officer who worked for Rappaport — said that Secord had
personally asked him to try to recover the money.

The Bechtel pipeline negotiations were unfolding against a backdrop of what
has been described as a geopolitical “tilt” designed to “draw Iraq permanently into
the camp of America’s Gulf allies”? A key component of this tilt was the
expansion of lines of credit provided to Iraq that were arranged and guaranteed by
the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a New Deal-era public corporation
set up to provide financing and protections for the US agricultural sector.
Ostensibly, the CCC credits to Iraq were to be used strictly for agricultural
purchases, with the US adding additional nonagricultural credits via the Export-
Import Bank, the same entity involved in the Bechtel pipeline negotiations. The
primary bank used to issue these credits was the Atlanta branch of Banca
Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) - the Italian bank that, as mentioned earlier, was
working with Banque Worms in financing arms transfers to Iran.

In 1989, BNL-Atlanta was raided by the FBI, and revelations soon followed
that the bank had been providing massive loans to Iraq that were “far in excess of
the amounts reported to the Federal Reserve” These loans, in turn, were being
used by Iraq to purchase weapons. Beside the CCC-guaranteed lines of credit that
were mixed in with BNLs lending, the possibility was raised that the CCC itself —
with or without its knowledge — had acted as an underwriter of arms deals. An
investigation into what was dubbed “Iraqgate” led to the verdict that there was, in
fact, no conspiracy on the part of the CCC and the Reagan administration to arm
Iraq. Yet, the overlap in time with the Bechtel negotiations and Donald Rumsfeld's
trips to Iraq seems to paint a different picture.

The Export-Import Bank is just one direct connection between the
CCC/BNL affair and the Bechtel pipeline negotiations. Another was the
connection that came from Rappaport himself — his close associate at Inter
Maritime Bank, Alfred Hartmann. Hartmann, mentioned earlier in relation to the
loans provided to Marc Rich, also maintained a high-ranking position at BNL.
Given that Hartmann tended to appear at banks as a representative of BCCI, this
may indicate a relationship between BNL and BCCI. Indeed, in 1991, the New
York Times reported that BNL-Atlanta had been receiving massive transfers of
money from BCCI and its subsidiary First American Bankshares. These
transfers, which were happening at the same time as the Iraq loans, appeared to
have been made in order to keep the BNL branch afloat.

In the US Congressional hearings that investigated Iraqgate, the relationship
between BCCI and BNL: Italian leadership was further elucidated. According to a
written statement provided by the head of BNLs North American operations,
BNLs former managing director, A. Ferrari — who resigned in 1981 after his
membership in the notorious P2 Masonic lodge was revealed — had been close to
“Pakistani nationals connected to BCCI.” The statement further identified
Ferrari as a close friend of Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano who
wound up dead under exceedingly murky circumstances. It also added that Ferrari
and the head of BNL’ international division, A. Florio, had worked closely with
the corruption-plagued Vatican Bank. Finally, the statement charged that Ferrari
and Florio exclusively handled BNL’ “relationship with people like [Ghaith]
Pharaon and Marc Rich.”22+

BCCI and BNL appeared together again in relation to a strange firm called
Allivane International Group, which was described in a UK parliamentary inquiry

as a “ghost company? Allivane was, like BNL, a participant in the Bofors-led

powder cartel that moved propellant powder, munitions, and weapons parts. At
the same time, Allivane was participating in multiple illicit weapons deals with
Iraq, and, by 1993, the company’s leadership was wanted for questioning in the
US in relation to the BNL-Atlanta loans.?22 Leaders included Allivane’s founder,
Terry Byrne, who had previously worked at a company called International Signal
and Control and, before that, a “New Jersey firm called Rexon Corp.”

Rexon was subsequently placed under investigation for, among other things,
providing artillery-fuse parts to Iraq. International Signal and Control, meanwhile,
had been founded by James Guerin who was linked, by the UK inquiry, to the
Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, and who between 1984 and 1988 provided
minerals used in munitions to Iraq.” Ari Ben-Menashe, the former Israeli
intelligence officer, has charged that Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark Thatcher was
also close to Cardoen and had used this connection to broker the sale of
armaments to Iraq. At the time, Thatcher was living in Texas, where he had
cultivated contacts that included former Senator John Tower.

While the relationship between Allivane and BNL remains vague, what is
certain is that BCCI was working closely with both companies. It reportedly held
several different accounts at BCCI during the mid-1980s and, in 1987, BCCI was
“prepared to ensure the sale of 50,000 sets of fuses” by Allivane.2“® Invoices
obtained by British parliamentarians further indicated a business relationship
between Allivane and a company called Space Research Corporation, which had
been tied in other reports to Allivane’s successor Rexon Corp, to Carlos Cardoen
and Mark Thatcher, and to BCCI.

Space Research Corporation is best remembered for the man behind the
company: Gerald Bull, a Canadian-born engineer and artillery expert who, prior
to his 1990 assassination in the doorway of his Brussels apartment, had designed
weapons systems for the Iraqis and the Chinese. He had also brokered the sale of
arms to South Africa. Yet, his most famous effort was Project Babylon.

Commissioned by the Iraqi government, Project Babylon was intended to
construct a series of space guns, based on Bull’s earlier designs for launching
satellites into orbit. These guns would be used to fire projectiles high into the
atmosphere or near-earth orbit in order to reach targets far beyond the range of
normal artillery equipment.

The ownership structure of Space Research Corporation was fascinating. In
the late 1960s, it was jointly controlled by the Great West Saddlery Company and
Arthur D. Little, the Boston corporate consultancy firm and think tank. The CEO
of Arthur D. Little at the time was General James Gavin. In 1982, Gavin, along
with Clark Clifford’s partner Robert Altman, joined the board of Financial
General Bankshares. Great West Saddlery had been a defunct company taken over
by Edward and Peter Bronfman — the nephews of Samuel Bronfman — and they
transformed it into an investment vehicle.*8 The acquisition of companies by way
of Great West Saddlery was financed through Edper Investments, a holding
company owned by the brothers. Edper, in turn, had been financed through the
sale of Seagram's stock held by Edward and Peter Bronfman.

When the Iraqgate scandal began to break in the early 1990s, attention turned
to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger because, in 1985, he had taken a spot
on the international advisory board of BNL. Furthermore, Kissinger’s corporate
consultancy firm, Kissinger Associates, counted the Italian bank as a client.
Kissinger Associates, which had been set up in the early 1980s with seed money
provided by a syndicate of large Wall Street firms led by Goldman Sachs, stacked
its partner list with many prominent individuals. Lawrence Eagleburger held a
spot at the firm from 1985 through 1989, right between stints as Reagan's
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and George H.W.Bush’s Deputy
Secretary of State. Eagleburger had a long history with Kissinger, having served as
his special assistant way back in the Nixon administration. Another Kissinger
assistant from this period was Brent Scowcroft, who also ended up at Kissinger
Associates before becoming Bush’s National Security Advisor in 1989.

Both Eagleburger and Scowcroft were linked by government investigators and
by the press to BNL, despite their protestations that they had played no role in the
Iraq weapons deals. “On three occasions between 1986 and 1989,’ Rep. Henry B.
Gonzalez of Texas recounted, “Mr. Scowcroft briefed the BNL board on
international political and economic developments??? Once back in government,
Scowcroft pushed for the expansion of the Commodity Credit Corporation's Iraq
program, and enlisted his underlings in the NSC to provide political pressure to
ensure this came to pass.

Eagleburger, meanwhile, was identified as having been present at meetings
between BNL managers and Kissinger Associates in 1987. Though he denied
interactions with BNL, events during the year prior to this meeting suggest that

Eagleburger was being less than honest. In 1986, LBS Bank, the US subsidiary of
Yugoslavias Ljubljanska Banka, was set up in New York City, and Eagleburger
joined the board of directors. Roughly 2 percent of LBS’ business was carried out
with BNL, and it had even purchased some of the loans that the Italian bank had
made to Iraq.282 Two years after it had opened its doors, LBS Bank was implicated
in a money-laundering scheme connected to the transfer of high technology to the
Eastern Bloc.”

Kissinger also had personal ties to George P. Shultz. As with Eagleburger and
Scowcroft, the relationship between the men formed during the Nixon
administration. Kissinger attested, “For decades, George and I talked practically
every Sunday,’ and that if “in a position to choose a president, I would select
George Shultz.”222 When Shultz first accepted the position as Reagan’s Secretary
of State, Kissinger was the first person he consulted. Reportedly, this
consultation pertained directly to developing a roadmap for Middle East policy. It
seems likely that the question of Iraq was among the subjects discussed.

Besides the personal relationship between Kissinger and Shultz, there was a
line running from Kissinger Associates to Bechtel via William E. Simon, a director
at the firm who had served as a consultant to the construction giant. He also
served on the board of Tamco, a corporate concern of the Gouletas family, who
are discussed in relation to Jeffrey Epstein in chapter 11, and was also connected
to Covenant House and AmeriCares, discussed in chapter 10. Simon further
maintained a position as chairman of an investment vehicle controlled by Suliman
Olayan, a Saudi investor who had embarked on major joint ventures with
Bechtel.2“4 Simon, too, had a long history with Kissinger. For instance, he had
served as Shultz’s successor as Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, and while there he
developed what Kissinger later described as an “affectionate comradeship” with
the Secretary of State.”

Each of these facts is certainly suggestive. When put together, a portrait
emerges of a network — wrapped inside the Reagan administration but extending
beyond it into companies such as Kissinger Associates, Bechtel, and BNL - that
was working to not only promote the “tilt” to Iraq but was actively aiding Iraq in
its fight against Iran. Particular institutions such as BNL - and BCCI - appear to
have worked both sides of the conflict, supplying money and logistical support for
the flow of arms to Iran and Iraq alike.

Seen from this perspective, the Bofors-led powder cartel, which was
interlinked with the activities of the Enterprise, was just one element in a truly
international network of money laundering, backroom deals, and arms trafficking.
This tapestry, in turn, was the backdrop for the dark maneuvers of factional
infighting that cut across the governments of the countries involved.

To bring these matters full circle, it is worth turning to the matter, left
unresolved in the official inquiry, of the ties of Kissinger Associates to BCCI. In
1986, a consultant with Kissinger’s firm, Sergio de Costa, was recruited by BCCI
to aid in the takeover of a bank in Brazil. Before the ink had dried on the
paperwork, de Costa began to lobby Kissinger Associates to take BCCI on as a
client. He found an ally at Kissinger Associates in Alan Stoga, a former chief
economist at the First National Bank of Chicago — an institution historically
linked to Rockefeller interests. Stoga - who had reportedly attended the 1987
meeting with BNL where Lawrence Eagleburger was also present — later
communicated extensively with BCCI principals and even, on a handful of
occasions, met with them in person.

When the BCCI inquiry was underway, Kissinger Associates painted a picture
in which Stoga had pushed for the firm to take on BCCI on as a client, while
Kissinger had been more reticent. This narrative was shaped by the files and
communiqués that the firm had turned over to investigators, indicating that
Stoga’s talks with BCCI terminated in December 1988. Yet, the files turned over
by BCCI itself complicated this picture: they showed that Stoga was still meeting
with BCCI representatives a month later, in January 1989. Kissinger Associates
stated that Stoga reiterated at this meeting that the talks could not continue, but
BCCTI’s files stated that, at the meeting, it “was established that it is in our interest
for both parties to continue with conversations. As such, the door for an eventual
relationship remains open.”2=

With BCCI’s compounding notoriety and eventual collapse, a working
relationship between the bank and Kissinger Associates was never cemented.
Kissinger Associates did, however, make an “unofficial” recommendation for
BCCI by referring them to the New York law firm of Arnold & Porter.” One of
the partners at Arnold & Porter, named directly on the referral to BCCI, was
William D. Rogers, who had served beneath Kissinger in 1976 as the
Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. Rogers had subsequently helped

Kissinger set up Kissinger Associates and was serving on the board at the time that
the Arnold & Porter recommendation was being made.

RIVALRIES

Bre deep within the pages of testimony, declassified documentation entered

into evidence, and summaries that make up the bulk of the published Iran-
Contra proceedings, there are faint traces and hints of an internecine bureaucratic
feud that trickled down into Contra-support operations. Scattered throughout this
documentation, one finds references to an entity called “the Supermarket,’ based
out of Honduras. A leading military official stationed in Latin America, General
John R. Galvin, described the Supermarket as a place where “a lot of weapons ...
from somewhere overseas” were stored.222 An unnamed CIA officer who was
called to testify, meanwhile, called the Supermarket a “private organization” that
was operating in league with “international arms dealers”?

The independent counsel's final report (also known as the Walsh report)
identifies the figures behind the Supermarket as Ron Martin and Colonel James
McCoy, the latter having recruited the former sometime in late 1984. McCoy was
a “former US military attaché to Nicaragua,” while Martin was “a Miami-based
arms dealer who had been the focus of investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol,
Firearms and Tobacco for many years”? The report adds that Martin had “at one
time been charged with providing arms illegally to narcotics traffickers.”

The Supermarket actually predated the Secord-led Contra airlift that had been
set up at North’s behest. This is clearly illustrated in the Walsh report and is
alluded to by Howard Kohn and Vicki Monks in their reporting on Iran-Contra
that appeared in Rolling Stone. Kohn and Monks write that, while Operation Black
Eagle was breaking down and the Enterprise was being assembled, William Casey
“turned to a third weapons smuggling operation” Martin and McCoy were not
part of Casey’s network of operatives; they were instead “entrepreneurs who had
learned about the Contra slush fund and hoped to profit from it”?

As the Enterprise swung into motion, a significant rivalry developed between
the two groups. North’s personal notebooks illustrate that the Supermarket
became a growing concern for the Enterprise during 1985. That spring, North
wrote down information about Martin and McCoy’s operation that Secord had
gleaned from Rafael Quintero, the CIA-trained Cuban exile who had become

involved with the Shackley network in the 1970s. Among the information listed
was that Martin was wanted in Guatemala for “criminal activity” and that Defex -
the Portuguese arms dealing outfit that Secord was close to — would not do
business with them.

North also noted that there was “possible Martin interference w/Puerto
Cortez [sic] delivery.’ This was a reference to an Enterprise-organized weapons
shipment from Portugal destined for Puerto Cortés in Honduras, which Martin
had learned about through his own network of sources. He dispatched the
Supermarket’s chief agent, the Cuban American Mario Delamico, who posed as
one of Secord’s employees in order to obtain a cargo manifest from the ship, the
Erria, when it docked. Martin later stated that he “used the manifest and other
documents that Dellamico [sic] took from the Erria to convince [Mario] Calero
that Secord was ‘ripping off’ the Contras.”

Other notes made by North show that he was interested in where the money
for the Supermarket had come from in the first place. On July 12, 1985, he wrote
that he had received information that the “[Honduran] Army plans to seize all
[weapons] when supermarket comes to a bad end,” and that “$14 [million] to
finance [the Supermarket] came from drugs”? Despite the relationship between
North’s operations and drug traffickers, he used this link of the Supermarket’s
financing to drugs — with Noriega allegedly being the connection here — to warn
others to avoid them. North later stated that he was being guided in these
decisions by William Casey himself.

Evidence of Martin’s wider involvement with the Latin America drug trade
comes through his choice to employ Theodore Klein, a Miami criminal-defense
lawyer, as his attorney. Klein had previously represented Jack DeVoe, a pilot and
owner of a charter airline service that operated as a front for a Colombian-led
cocaine-smuggling operation. DeVoe had entered the world of drug smuggling in
1970 and, by the 1980s, he was in league with a powerful drug smuggler named
Pepe Cabrera, a partner of Carlos Lehder.“*2 When it came to laundering the
proceeds of this smuggling operation, DeVoe looked to Jack Freeman - a veteran
of Paul Helliwell’s law firm and, for a time, the in-house counsel for Castle Bank &
Trust.248

According to Theodore Klein, Felix Rodriguez — a longtime actor in CIA
shadow operations who was then connected to the Enterprise — had some sort of

“business relationship” with the Supermarket. This particular connection may

help determine who might have been the actual benefactors of the Supermarket.
By 1986, significant tensions had built up between Rodriguez and North, but the
Walsh report shows extensive contact between Rodriguez and Donald Gregg, the
former CIA official who had become Vice President Bush’s National Security
Advisor.

Rodriguez had first been introduced to North through William R. Bode, a
State Department official who might have also been an asset for the CIA.*® That
same day, Rodriguez met with Gregg to discuss “his [Rodriguez’s] interest in
going to El Salvador.’ Gregg promised to make introductions between Rodriguez
and key people and reported the meeting to Vice President Bush as soon as it
concluded. Less than a month later, Gregg arranged for a meeting between
Rodriguez and Bush to discuss counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador.

When Rodriguez was running the Enterprise’s Contra resupply operations
from El Salvador, working under him as the day-to-day operations manager was
CIA-trained Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles. Posada was a real piece of work —
during the 1970s, he had been one of the founding members of the Cuban exile
terrorist group CORU, but he had maintained a close connection with US
organized crime figures like Lefty Rosenthal before CORU existed. In the decade
prior to his recruitment as a cog in the Enterprise’s machinery, he had been
identified as “big time trafficker” of Colombian cocaine into Miami.7>2

Records indicate that North was kept abreast of Rodriguez's repeated
meetings with Gregg, but it is doubtful that he knew everything that was being
discussed between the two. The Walsh report indicates that Rodriguez used those
opportunities to express his misgivings about North and the Enterprise, at one
point telling Gregg that North was “involved in the Edwin Wilson group.”2°3

Whether or not this referred to something earlier in North’s career, or simply
to the presence of old Shackley network operators like Secord and Clines in the
Enterprise, is not clear. However, the role being played by Clines in the Enterprise
troubled Rodriguez to no end. The two had been friends going back to the Bay of
Pigs, but they had split up over the covert involvement with Libya. Gregg wrote
notes about this split that were later entered into evidence during the Iran-Contra
hearings. He also noted that “Tom Clines = snake! (would sell his mother) 254

In Joseph Trento’s Prelude to Terror — largely based on interviews he carried
out with Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, and others from that nexus — he recounts
that it had been Clines who had first introduced and brought Wilson and

Rodriguez together in 1973. Wilson, in turn, put Rodriguez in touch with the
infamous arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, who at the time was looking for
somebody to train the Falangists in Lebanon. According to Soghanalian, Wilson
told him to take Rodriguez to Lebanon and “don’t bring him back ... get rid of
him”255

As the tension built between North and Rodriguez, Rodriguez appeared to
have been leveraging his contact with Bush via Donald Gregg. The Walsh report
states that, in early 1986, Rodriguez was causing “continual problems” by boasting
of his “very close relationship with the Vice President and a number of his
people”?5ć On January 9, North wrote in his notebook “Felix talking too much
about VP connection.” Several months later, notes made by North's assistant
Robert Earl added a few more pieces to the puzzle. During a meeting between
NSC staffers and representatives (including Gregg) of the Office of the Vice
President, Earl wrote the following: “Felix needs to be eased out w/honor,’ “Felix
claims working w/VP blessing for CIA,” “Mario Delameco [sic], Miami = Felix
contact,” and “Calero—Martin link = a problem too”?57

The relationship between Rodriguez and the Supermarket on one side, and
between Rodriguez and Bush on the other, raises an important question: was Vice
President Bush the ultimate backer of Martin and McCoy’s operation? If so, it
would likely reflect the ongoing power struggle, first addressed in the last chapter,
between Casey and Bush. Casey, after all, was the ultimate backer of the
Enterprise, having effectively outsourced CIA activities to North and the
remnants of the Shackley network.

There is also other evidence that links Bush to the Supermarket. Howard
Kohn and Vicki Monks, for example, noted that the Supermarket was popular
among influential Contra supporters in Miami, precisely where Jeb Bush was
doing private fundraising for the Contras and, according to a Customs report, was
involved in gunrunning on behalf of the fighters.2°° Intriguingly, Newsweek
reported in 1988 that it had obtained an NSC report stating that “disclosure of
‘covert black money’ flowing into Honduras to fund military projects ‘could
damage’ Vice President Bush”?

There are also questions of potential connections to Robert Corson, the
Houston land developer and rumored CIA asset who was the son-in-law of Bush's
friend (and potential intelligence cut-out) Walter Mischer. Corson, as discussed in
the last chapter, was identified by controversial whistleblower Richard Brenneke

as his partner in money-laundering activities. Importantly, Brenneke further
stated that Corson and the Supermarket’s Ron Martin were business partners and
had even jointly owned a casino in the Canary Islands for several years in the early
1980s.2% Also suggestive is a complex real estate deal in Florida that involved a
thrift, controlled by Corson, called VisionBanc. VisionBanc and several other
S&Ls lent money to Mike Adkinson, a reputed arms dealer, to buy up property in
the Florida panhandle from St. Joe Paper Company, then controlled by DuPont
interests.2@

When the deal was settled, the money from VisionBanc, never to be paid
back, was swiftly tucked away in the Isle of Jersey branch of Bank Cantrade. This
was the same bank where Jack Freeman was hiding the proceeds from Jack
DeVoe’s drug smuggling - and, as mentioned earlier, DeVoe used the same
attorney, Theodore Klein, as Ron Martin. It was also the same bank from which
GeoMiliTech had drawn its offshore finance managers.

A much more direct linkage comes in the figure of S. Cass Weiland, a Houston
lawyer who was retained by Corson. Weiland appears extensively in North's
notebooks, mostly in conjunction with figures circulating around the
Supermarket. In 1984, North was following a project in Belize that involved both
Weiland, then serving as counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, and a Cuban exile named Sergio Brull.2% Brull appeared later in
the notebooks as a key contact for Martin and for John Molina, a Cuban American
businessman who was shot to death in Panama in October 1987.

Molina, in the 1970s, was the president of UniBank, the Panamanian
subsidiary of the WFC Corporation — the CIA-linked drug smuggling operation
and money laundromat — that was co-owned by the First National Bank of
Louisville After WFC went bust, Molina continued to operate in the
underworld and eventually became the chief banker for the Supermarket.

If Robert Corson, as Pete Brewton argues, was part of an intelligence
apparatus that was tied up with George H.W.Bush, then Corson’s connections to
banks and to individuals linked to the Supermarket becomes indicative of a
pattern. Tellingly, Belize, the country where Weiland and Martin’s associate Brull
was active, was a primary node for the drug-smuggling ring in which DeVoe was
involved. According to a UPI report, “cocaine was flown to Belize and islands in
the Caribbean, then to processing points in the United States.... The pure cocaine

was then brought to Miami where it was diluted and eventually distributed for
street sales throughout the United States”?

Brull was mentioned in a 1986 FBI interview given by Richard Secord that
concerned an investigation that had been launched into the activities of Jack
Terrell. Terrell, using the name “Colonel Flaco” had worked with the Contras
through his position in Civilian Materiel Assistance, the militia outfit used to train
and assist the fighters that was connected to Singlaub, among others.*° He
subsequently became a whistleblower, turning over information to Florida
authorities linking Oliver North, Robert Owen, and John Hull to gun running and
drug smuggling. This was prior to revelations about the Enterprise that followed
the doomed flight of Eugene Hasenfus in October 1986.

Terrell also provided information to the media. In June 1986, he appeared on
a television show called West 57th, where he made allegations that the Contra-
support flights were also being used to move drugs into the US. Several days later,
North met with assistant FBI director Oliver “Buck” Revell to discuss identifying
Terrell as a terrorist suspect — one with potential ties to Nicaraguan intelligence, to
boot! This was a clever move on the part of North. In 1984, North organized a
special group within the NSC called the Terrorist Incident Working Group
(TIWG), which in turn spawned a secretive subunit called the Operations Sub-
Group (OSG). This apparatus, dedicated to counterterrorism activities, was made
up of North’s allies across various agencies — including Buck Revell.

By designating Terrell a terrorism suspect, the FBIs counterterrorism
operation was plugged directly into the NSC through Revell, allowing North to
have a direct means of monitoring the whistleblower. On July 17, 1986, North
sent a memo to Admiral Poindexter stating that, concerning Terrell, the “FBI has
notified the Secret Service and is preparing a counterintelligence/counter-
terrorism operation plan for review by OSG-TIWG tomorrow”

The FBI interviewed Secord just under a week later, on July 23, 1986. He told
the agents that Terrell’s allegations were part of a “concerted effort” by an
interconnected group of individuals. Operating in “collusion” with Terrell, Secord
continued, was “Sergio Brulle [sic], a Cuban-American with a commercial
business, a (FNU) [first name unknown] Gomez, whom he described as a bad
Cuban involved with drug running?”22 Secord, in other words, was linking Terrell
to the Supermarket, since Brull was tied to Martin. Gomez might have been none
other than Felix Rodriguez, who frequently went under the alias “Max Gomez.”

This statement raises more questions than it answers. By tying Terrell to the
Supermarket, was Secord trying to place Martin and McCoy’s outfit under FBI
counterterrorism surveillance? Or was there truth to this statement? If it was the
latter, then it would seem that the Supermarket could have been trying to expose
the Enterprise in the press and to US law enforcement. This would directly parallel
the claims later made by Seymour Hersh: that a secret intelligence apparatus, run
from the Office of the Vice President, had leaked information to the press
concerning the missile sales to Iran.

Information and insider knowledge, it seems, was the weapon of choice in the
shadow wars fought behind and beneath the bloody covert operations of the
Reagan era.

Endnotes

Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign
Relations, One Hundred Second Congress, Second Session, US Senate, December 1992, 41,
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=CoKC-Sxb9kIC,

Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, “BCCI: The Dirtiest Bank of Them All,” TIME, July 29, 1991,

Beaty and Gwynne, “BCCI: The Dirtiest Bank.’

The BCCI Affair recounts that “Abedi’s philosophy was often an obscure mix of Islamic
mysticism, focusing on the links between the individual, the family, and the universe; and
self-help motivational pitches” (Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 41). Beaty and Gwynne cite
BCCI employees who stated that Abedi would do strange tricks at the bank’s training
seminars. “He would hold a piece of paper in his hand and tell them to concentrate on an
ink spot in the middle of it, making it grow and shrink in size. As it turned out, there was no
ink spot, but he made them believe it” Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A
Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (Ramjac Inc, 1991), 266-67.

Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt
Financial Empire (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 11.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 11.

“The BCCI-CIA Connection: Just How Far Did It Go?,’ Newsweek, December 6, 1992,
https://www.newsweek.com/bcci-cia-connection-just-how-far-did-it-go-195454.
“The BCCI-CIA Connection.”

Beaty and Gwynne, “BCCI: The Dirtiest Bank of Them All.”

Christopher O. Clary, “The A. Q. Khan Network: Causes and Implications,” thesis, Naval
Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA., Dec. 2005.

Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 255, 262.
Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 139.
Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 34.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 34.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 46.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 59.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 128.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 128.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 128.

Alan A. Block and Constance Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money
Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Praeger, 2004), 41.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 40.

Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer (Random House, 1996),
321-22.

Douglas W. Cray, “People and Business,’ New York Times, December 27, 1974.

24

25
26
27

28

29
30
31

32

33
34
35
36

37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50

Rob Wells, “BCCI Links to Oil Industry, AP News, August 26, 1991,
https://apnews.com/article/228b9990df1c5f952c542cf256d0fd17.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 43.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 128, 134.

On Irvani and Credit and Commerce Holdings, see The BCCI Affair: Hearings Before the
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Terrorism of the Committee on Foreign
Relations, One Hundred and Second Congress, First Session, August 1, 2, and 8, 1991, Part 1,
p. 114; On Irvani and Richard Helms as business partners, see “The BCCI-CIA Connection:
Just How Far Did It Go?” Newsweek, December 6, 1991, https://www.newsweek.com/bcci-
cia-connection-just-how-far-did-it-go-195454.

“Ex-CIA Leader Aided Bcci Effort, Report Says,’ Deseret News, February 16, 1992,
https://www.deseret.com/1992/2/16/18968049/ex-cia-leader-aided-bcci-effort-report-says-
br.

“Ex-CIA Leader Aided BCCI.”

“Ex-CIA Leader Aided BCCI.”

Douglas Frantz, “BCCI: Odd Bank with Air of Cult: From its Roots in Pakistan until its Closure
by Regulators, the Institutions Story Is One of Secretive Clients, Powerful Friends, and Global
Fraud,’ Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 1991, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-09-
03-mn-1965-story.html; Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 145.

Whitney Webb, “The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton Relationship,’

bill-clinton-relationship/261455/.
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 73.
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 84.
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 376.

Scott Chase and Chapin Wright, “BANKING, FINANCE,’ Washington Post, June 29, 1981,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1981/06/29/banking-
finance/8893eab1-954c-458e-b9dd-1b0de7554f92/.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 523.

Frantz, “BCCI: Odd Bank.’

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 179.

Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 228.

Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (SPI Books, 1992), 221.
Russ Baker, Family of Secrets (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 296-97.
Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 486.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 612.

Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 238-45.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair 93-94.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair 99.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair 98.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 101.

Philip Shendon, “BCCI’s Best Customer Is Also Its Worst Customer,” New York Times, August 6,
1991.

51
52
53
54
55
56

57

58

59

60
61

62

63
64

65
66
67

68
69

70
71
72
73

74
75

Truell and Gurwin. False Profits, 35.

Block and Weaver, Clouded by Desire, 86.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 482.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 18.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 320.

Susan Mazur, “Caspian Tales: John Deuss, Oil, Spooks and Cohibas,” Scoop Independent News,
November 29, 2007, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HLO711/S00443/caspian-tales-
johndeuss-oil-spooks-cohibas.htm.

Christopher Dicky, “US Firm, Headed by Ex-ClA Man, Provides Oman More Than Stability,’
Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1986.

On Tetra Tech and Tetra Finance, see Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 319. On Tetra Finance,
John Shaheen, and BCCI links, see Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 315-18.

William J. Eaton, “Senate Told of Noriega-BCCI Cover-Up,’ Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1992,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-3 1-mn-4549-story.html.

Eaton, “Senate Told of Noriega-BCCI Cover-Up.”

Ricardo Castillo, “Convicted Trafficker Describes Noriega’s Links to Drug Cartel,’ Washington
Post, Nov. 20, 1991,

describes-noriegas-links-to-drug-cartel/50a6668d-242e-4b66-805f-e611ed11715¢/.

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central
America (University of California Press, 1998), 68.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 66.

See Howard Kohn and Vicky Monks, “The Dirty Secrets of George Bush,’ Rolling Stone,

of-george-bush-71927/; John Cummings and Ernest Volkman, “Snowbound,” Penthouse,
July 1989.

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.’

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 74.

Armstrong, Scott, Malcolm Byrne, Thomas S. Blanton, Laurence Chang, Glenn Baker, and
National Security Archive, The Chronology: The Documented Day-to-Day Account of the Secret
Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (NY: Warner, 1987), 12, 13, 15, 19, 26, 24, 33,
https://archive.org/details/chronologydocumeO0arms.

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.’

Joseph John Trento, Prelude to Terror : The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private
Intelligence Network (New York : Carroll & Graf, 2005), 276,
http://archive.org/details/preludetoter-rorr0Otren.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 277.
Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 148.
Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 152.

Final Report of the Independent Counsel for lran/Contra Matters, Volume 1: Investigations and
Prosecutions, United States Court Of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, August 4,

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 237.
Final Report, chap. 8.

76
77

78
i9

80
81
82

83
84
85

86
87

88

89
90
91
92

93
94

Edward Cowan, “Board Defeat Angers Cornfeld,” New York Times, July 2, 1970.

Joint Hearings Before the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with
Iran and Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan
Opposition: Testimony of Robert C. McFarlane, Gaston J. Sigur, Jr., and Robert W. Owen, One
Hundredth Congress, First Session, May 11, 12, 13, 14, and 19, 1987, p. 451,
https://archive.org/details/lran-ContraHearingsTestimonyTranscripts/1987-irn-0003-
McFarlane-Sigur-Owen/.

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 16.

David Rogers, “Panama Records Show Strongest Link between Swiss Firm, Airlift to Contras,’
Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1987.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 13.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87.

Susan B. Trento, The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in
Washington (St. Martin's Press, 1992), 262-63.

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 79.

E. Trine Starnes, on January 30, 1986, was invited to the White House to meet personally
with President Reagan, Spitz Channell, Elliot Abrams, and others. The special event was for
individuals who had donated $30,000 or more to the National Endowment for the
Preservation of Liberty. Starnes seems to have had ties to the circles around George
H.W.Bush. He was reportedly part of the group of S&L borrowers around Robert Corson and
John Riddle, referenced elsewhere here. He was also the second biggest borrower at
Silverado Savings, the Colorado thrift where Neil Bush sat on the board of directors. “On
September 30, 1986, exactly eight months after Starnes made his contribution to the Contra
cause, he and his associates received three loans from Silverado Savings totaling $77.5
million” (Brewton, The Mafia, 258).

Sidney Blumenthal, “Reagan Doctrine’s Passionate Advocate,’ Washington Post, Decem-ber
17, 1986, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/12/17/reagan-doctrines-
passionate-advocate/750d4579-a2f0-4f72-826c-33966e8b5e64/.

Allegations of Connections between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United
States, Vol. 2, The Contra Story, “Pilots, Companies, and Other Individuals Working for
Companies Used to Support the Contra Program,’ Oct. 8, 1998,

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 11.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 118-19.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 118.

Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy: A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on
Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Committee on Foreign Relations, United
States Senate, December 1988, 44, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 42.

“The Cali Cartel: The New Kings of Cocaine,’ US Department of Justice, November 1994,
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles 1/Digitization/152436NCIRS.pdf.

95
96

97
98
99
100

101
102

103

104

105
106

107
108

109

110

111

112
113

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

“US Probing Claims That CIA Operative, DEA Official Betrayal Led to Murder of Agent:
Report,’ Fox News, February 28, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/dea-agent-kiki-camare-
na-murder-investigation.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, 48.

Allegations of Connections, “Pilots, Companies, and Other Individuals Working for Companies
Used to Support the Contra Program?’

Allegations of Connections, “Pilots, Companies, and Other Individuals Working for Companies
Used to Support the Contra Program?”

Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, 49.

Gerald Colby, DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, ePub (Open Road Media, 2014),
1154.

FBI files on Civilian Materiel Assistance obtained by Edmund Berger via the Freedom of
Information Act request tie the CMA to the 20th Special Forces Group. Beyond this,
allegations have been made that the CMA, during the Contra years, obtained “surplus U.S.
military equipment from the 20th Special Forces Unit of the US Army in Alabama”
(“Declarations of the Plaintiff's Counsel, filed by the Christic Institute,’ US District Court,
Miami, Florida, March 31, 1988, 80).

On the World Anti-Communist League, see Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the
League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have
Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (Dodd Mead, 1986); and Russ Bellant, Old Nazis,
the New Right and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on Cold War
Policy (South End Press, 1991).

Block and Weaver, Clouded by Desire, 108.

Chip Berlet, The Hunt for the Red Menace: How Government Intelligence Agencies and Private
Right-Wing Groups Target Dissidents and Leftists as Subversive Terrorists and Outlaws (Political
Research Associates, 1994), https://politicalresearch.org/sites/default/files/2018-
10/huntred-1994. pdf.

Holly Sklar, Washington's War on Nicaragua (South End Press, 1999), 82.

Albin Krebs and Robert Thomas Jr., “Notes on People: Roy Cohn Joins Board of Anti-
Communist Group,’ New York Times, May 15, 1982.

Frank Rich, “The Original Donald Trump,’ New York Magazine, April 2018,

trump.html.

Rich, “Original Donald Trump.’

Robert Parry, “How Roy Cohn Helped Rupert Murdoch,’ January 28, 2015,

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 321.

On Samuel Cummings and John Tower, see Emma North-Best, John Tower's FBI File Reveals
Role in Iran-Contra Cover-Up,’ Muckrock, January 9, 2017,
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jan/09/john-towers-fbi-file-reveals-role-
iran-contra-cove/.

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134

The following information on GMT, unless stated otherwise, comes from Alan A. Block, “The
Origins of Iran-Contra: Lessons from the Durrani Affair,’ in Frank Bovenkirk and Michael Levi,
The Organized Crime Community: Essays in Honor of Alan A. Block (Springer Science, 2007), 12.
Bovenkirk and Levi, The Organized Crime Community, 12.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 76.

Roy Greenslade. Maxwell's Fall: An Insider's Account (Simon & Schuster, 1992), 133

Ari Ben-Menashe. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square
Press, 1992), 112

Ben-Menashe. Profits of War, 115.

Ben-Menashe. Profits of War, 155-156.

Ben-Menashe. Profits of War, 360-361.

Among Davies’ contacts in Ohio was “William Johnson, managing director of the now-
defunct Armtec International Columbus” - a very intriguing location, given the importance
of Columbus, Ohio in this book. Glenn Frankel, “Media Baron Sues Seymour Hersh’,
Washington Post, October 25, 1991,

seymour-hersh/c16c29e2-04ba-4038-9fff-081 13fa33b77/. See also “Book: Ohioans would-be
arms dealers’, Lancaster-Eagle Gazette, October 28, 1991.
Russell Davies. Foreign Body: The Secret Life of Robert Maxwell (Bloomsbury, 1995), 152-153.
John Merritt, “Davies: fresh evidence on arms deals’, The Observer, October 27, 1991.
Merritt, “Davies.”
Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 321.
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair: Testimony of
unnamed CIA Officer, Appendix B, Vol. 10, 610,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committee In/MB1
3AAAAMAAJ.
Report of the Congressional Committees, Appendix B, Vol. 10, 612.
Report of the Congressional Committees, Appendix B, Vol. 10, 691
Block, “Origins of Iran-Contra,” 15.
Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret
Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (South End Press, 1987), 175.
Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail (Harper Business, 1992), 70.
Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 113.
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 174-75. Nazerali’s partner in securities fraud schemes was
Irving Kott. Kott was an associate of Willie Obront, a “Montreal meat merchant who once
made front-page headlines across Canada after a public inquiry named him as a key money
launderer for the Cotroni mafia.” During the 1970s, Obront had moved to the US, where his
associates included a Meyer Lansky front man named Barry Ressler. See Tu Thahn Ha,
“Montreal Butcher Was a Banker for the Mafia,’ The Globe and Mail, July 31, 2019,
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-montreal-butcher-was-a-banker-for-the-
mafia/.

Obront also had ties to the Bronfman family. Pete Newman writes that “although he
vehemently denies any venal implications in his friendships, Mitchell Bronfman was
condemned in 1977 by having the Quebec Police Commission inquiry into organized crime

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157

as having had an ‘almost brotherly relationship’ with Willie Obront, a convicted kingpin of
Montreal’s underworld.’ See Peter Newman, The Bronfman Dynasty (McClelland and Stewart,
1978), 225.

Final Report, chap. 14

“FBI 302 - Record of Nan Morabia Interview,’ FBI, November 6, 1987,
https://archive.org/details/FBI302NanMorabia1.

John Tagliabue, “The White House Crisis; Small, Quiet Building in Geneva Had Wide Use,’
New York Times, December 3, 1986.

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Testimony of
Richard Secord, Appendix B, Vol. 24, 242, https://archive.org/details/lran-
ContraHearingsTestimonyTranscripts/1987-irn-0001-Secord/.

Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul (De
Capo Press, 2003), 37-38.

“Illicit Narcotics Threats,” Compiled by Office of the Deputy Director of the CIA for Robert
McFarlane, May 1984, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP-
86M00886R000800010012-3.pdf.

Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 142.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 567.

Jonathan Marshall, The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug
Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012), 160.

Kurt Eichenwald, “American Express to Sell Geneva Bank for $1 Billion,” New York Times,
December 29, 1989.

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 148.

Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and
Loans (Harper Perennial, 1991), 113.

International Petrodollar Crisis: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Finance of
the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Ninety-Third Congress,
Second Session, July and August 1974, 229, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/international-
petrodol-lar-crisis-225/fulltext.

Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 115.

Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 115-16; Brewton, The Mafia, 44-46.

Brewton, The Mafia, 45-46.

David Cay Johnston, “Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?’ POLITICO Magazine,

mob-organized-crime-213910.

Sydney Schanberg, “Gas Tax Cash and Re-Electing a Governor,’ New York Newsday,
December 4, 1987.

Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 165.
Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 165-66.

Brewton, The Mafia, 190-91. lorizzo was introduced to Samos by Eric D’Antin, a confidence
man with aristocratic pretensions. D’Antin is described in various press reports and court
cases as a “Mexican Duke who works as a banker in London,’ a “petroleum broker,’ an

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"Austrian duke,” and an “agent” of textile magnate Joseph Koret. In the 1980s D'Antin was
married to Michaela von Habsburg, the daughter of Otto von Habsburg. See “The Princess
and the P (for Press), Daily News, (New York), December 11, 1980. Also, Michaela’s former
sister-in-law, Francesca von Habsburg, is listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book.

Samos was married to Alma Robles Chiari, the heiress from a prominent and politically well-
connected family. In 1977, Alma and Samos’ partner, Ray Corona, attempted to purchase the
National Bank of South Florida. The bank, a well-known drug laundromat located in Hialeah,
was for sale by the First National Bank of Louisville. It had previously been owned by the
WFC Corporation, which was partnered with First National Bank of Louisville in the
ownership of Panama's UniBank, through which loans were granted to individuals and
institutions. When WFC began to collapse in the late 1970s, First National Bank of Louisville
was exposed to a compounding liquidity crunch. To compensate, WFC turned National Bank
of South Florida over to First National Bank of Louisville, and in order to recoup losses First
National Bank of Louisville placed it for sale. See James Ring Adams, The Big Fix: Inside the
S&L Scandal : How an Unholy Alliance of Politics and Money Destroyed America’s Banking
System (New York: Wiley, 1991), 72-84.

Other potential buyers for National Bank of South Florida from First National Bank of
Louisville included Gustavo Villoldo, a CIA-trained Cuban exile who was suspected of being
a front man for the WFC’s founder, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya. Villoldo would later
resurface in the covert Contra support operations. According to Peter Dale Scott and
Jonathan Marshall, Villoldo was sent in 1983 “into Central America by Vice President Bush’s
national security advisor Donald Gregg to advise the Contras on military strategy.’ This
would closely conform to reporting on Operation Black Eagle. Later, during the feud
between the Enterprise and the Supermarket, Oliver North toyed with the idea of using
Villoldo to take the Supermarket’s Mario Delamico “out of the picture.’ See Scott and
Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 29, 59.

Armstrong et al, The Chronology, 171.

Brewton, The Mafia, 192; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 197n60.

Major Financial Institutions of Continental Europe 1990/91 (Graham & Trotman Limited 1990),
179, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3022-6; The BCCI Affair: Hearings Before the
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on
Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session,
August 1, 1991, 475, part 1, https://books.google.com/books?id=8DLDVLJN_sUC.

Brewton, The Mafia, 53-57.

James S. Henry, Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy (Basic Books,
2005), 48.

Brewton, The Mafia, 55.

Brewton, The Mafia, 56.

On Hourani and Lamar, see Brewton, The Mafia, 130-31; on Hourani and Mainland, see Truell
and Gurwin, False Profits, 375-77.

Brewton, The Mafia, 130.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 376.

Brewton, The Mafia, 131.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 377.

Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 376.

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Michael Isikoff, “Deals of Developer Khashoggi Building Frustration in Utah,’ Washington
Post, January 4, 1987.
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 377.
R. T. Naylor, Patriots and Profiteers: Economic Warfare, Embargo Busting, and State-Sponsored
Crime (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 244.
Naylor, Patriots and Profiteers, 246.
“Illegal Arms to Iran: How the Banks Broke the Rules,’ Euromoney, October 1, 1991,
https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1dfgmpypmxgbc/illegal-arms-to-iran-how-the-
banks-broke-the-rules.
“In Un’ Agenda | Nomi Dell’ Iraq - Connection,’ La Repubblica, September 13, 1989,
nomi-dell-irag.html.
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair: Depositions,
Appendix B, Volume 3, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, 1988, 861,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committees l/u1 -
pOKeFesC.
“Illegal Arms to Iran: How the Banks Broke the Rules.”
John De Belot, “International Bankers: Jean Maxine Leveque Takes the Field,’ Les Echos,
March 2, 1992, https://www-lesechos-fr.translate.goog/1992/03/international-bankers-jean-
maxime-leveque-prend-du-champ-921859?
x tr sl=fr& x tr tleen& x tr hl=en& x tr_pto=sc; Report of the Congressional Committees
Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Depositions: Testimony of Emanuel A. Floor, Appendix B,
Volume 10, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, 1988, 486,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committee In/MB1
SAAAAMAAJ.
Gaetner Gilles, “The Other Lyonnais Scandal,’ l'Express, May 18, 2005, https://www-lex-press-
fr.translate.goog/informations/l-autre-scandale-du-lyonnais_607863.html?
x tr sl=fr& x tr tleen& x tr_hl=en& x tr_pto=sc; “Mansour Ojjeh Obituary,” The Times,

“Illegal Arms to Iran.’

Naylor, Patriots and Profiteers, 254.
Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 314.
Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 313.

uebliches-gebaren-a-52408d0c-0002-0001-0000-000014022410.

“Unusual Behavior.’

“Unusual Behavior.’

“Lonrho’s Foothold in Forwarding,’ The Guardian, June 29, 1981,

“Felix Przedborski: diplomaat en groot-officier met een loodzwaar strafblad,” De Tijd,
https://www.tijd.be/algemeen/algemeen/felix-przedborski-diplomaat-en-groot-officier-
met-een-loodzwaar-strafblad/5159483.html.

“Attacks on Press in 2004 - Costa Rica,’ Refworld, February, 2005,
https://www.refworld.org/docid/47c566d1c.html; Inter-American Court of Human Rights:

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content/uploads/2004/06/Costa19feb04 Amicus-Brief.pdf.

ATLAS Dossier, Translation provided by Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert
Politics, 15, https://isgp-studies.com/belgium-la-nebuleuse-atlas-dossier-and-dutroux-x-
files.

ATLAS Dossier, 6.

Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 144.

Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 144.

ATLAS Dossier, 20.

Doyle McManus, “Secret Airstrips Links CIA, State Department, to Contra Aid,’ Los Angeles
Times, March 1, 1987.

Willy van Damme, “Mossad-Een vrijgeleide in België, February 27, 2013,
https://willyvandamme.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/mossadeen-vrijgeleide-in-belgi/.
Van Damme, “Mossad.”

Alain Lallemand, “Jacques Monsieur Arrested in Turkey,’ Center for Public Integrity, May 14,

Van Damme, “Mossad.”
Block and Weaver, Clouded by Desire, 110-11.
Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 612.

“Call Girls, Tax Fraud and Weapons,’ De Morgen, January 10, 2001,
https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/callgirls-fiscale-fraude-en-wapenhandel~b6c633de/.

René Haquin, “Bribes at VDB?,’ Le Soir, Sept. 28, 1988, https://www.lesoir.be/art/pots-de-vin-
a-vdb_t-19880928-Z01062.html.

“Call Girls, Tax Fraud and Weapons.’
ATLAS Dossier, 15.

Jack Colhoun, “BCCI: The Bank of the CIA,” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring, 1993, 41,
https://archive.org/details/covert_action 44; Block, “Origins of Iran-Contra.”

Colhoun, “BCCI: The Bank of the CIA,’ 40-42.

Gary Sick, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, 1st
ed (New York: Times Books, 1991), 220.

The Investigation of State Department Officials: Shultz, Hill and Platt: Final Report, ch 24,

Dana Priest, “Rumsfeld Visited Baghdad in 1984 to Reassure Iraqis, Documents Show,’
Washington Post, December 19, 2003,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/12/19/rumsfeld-visited-baghdad-
in-1984-to-reassure-iraqis-documents-show/2aaa6f-bc-5 9bd-46e7-86ca-8ca84fa1 cOf4/.

The long history of Shultz at Bechtel is discussed in Sally Denton, The Profiteers: Bechtel and
the Men Who Built the World (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

“Bechtel in Iraq: Shultz and Rumsfeld,’ Zfacts, https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/p/170.html.

The pipeline negotiations and Bruce Rappaport’s role in them is discussed at length in Block
and Weaver, Clouded by Desire.

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Block and Weaver, Clouded by Desire, 74.
Steven Hurst, The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War (Edinburgh

questioned-over-loans-to-iraq/f85edf9c-269e-48c7-9654-47ce34be09fa/.

Kurt Eichenwald, “BCCI Once Lent Money to Bank Tied to Iraq Loans,” New York Times, July
11,1991.

Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs: Testimony of Former
Employees of the Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro, November 9, 1993, Vol. 4, 176,
https://archive.org/details/testimonyofforme1994unit/page/176/mode/2up.

Testimony of Former Employees of the Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro, 176.

“Arms Exports (Iraq), Hansard, UK Parliament, House of Commons, November 23, 1992,
“Update on BNL Investigation,’ Congressional Record, House of Representatives, January 21,
1993, https://irp.fas.org/congress/1993_cr/h930121-bni.htm.

Douglas Frantz, “Sale of US Bomb Material to Iraq Probed,” Los Angeles Times, February 1,
1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-01-mn-979-story.html.

“Around the Nation: Thatcher's Son to Stay in Dallas Flat after All” New York Times, April 25,
1986.

“Arms Exports (Iraq).”

The connections between Cardoen, Bull, and Mark Thatcher are made by Ari Ben-Menashe,
Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square Press, 1992).
Newman, Bronfman Dynasty, 244-45.

Lardner Jr., “Bush Aides Ethics Questioned.’

Henry, Blood Bankers, 348.

Walter Pincus, “Kissinger’s Clients May Be Revealed,” Washington Post, February 11, 1989.
Henry A. Kissinger, “A Remembrance of George P. Shultz,’ October 17, 2021,

Don Oberdorfer, “Kissinger’s New Team,’ Washington Post, August 24, 1982,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/08/24/kissingers-new-
team/c313bd33-2912-4855-8efb-73674d5c56dd/.

L. J. Davis, “William Simon’s Pacific Overtures,” New York Times Magazine, December 27, 1987,
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/27/magazine/william-simon-s-facific-overtures.html;
Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story - The Most Secret Corporation and
How It Engineered the World (Ballantine Books, 1988), 187, 210.

Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal, ePub (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 1294.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 92.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 560.

Kerry and Brown, BCCI Affair, 560.

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Testimony of Gen.
John R. Galvin, Appendix B, Vol. 11, 1988, 582,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committees _|/w8U
9sKdxC3wC.

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253
254
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256
257
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261

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Testimony of
unnamed CIA Officer, appendix B, Vol. 5, 1988, 148,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committee In/6ft4
AAAAMAAJ.

Final Report, chap. 21.

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.”

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.”

Final Report, chap. 21.

Final Report, chap. 21.

Organized Crime and Cocaine Trafficking, President's Commission on Organized Crime,
November, 1984, 252,

AAAMAAJ; “Smuggler Convicted in Case Implicating Governments,’ UPI, July 6, 1986,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/07/06/Smuggler-convicted-in-case-implicating-
governments/4859584164800/.

Brewton, The Mafia, 286.

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.’

Final Report, chap. 29 (Donald P. Gregg), https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/walsh/chap_29.htm;
Webb, Dark Alliance, 339.

Final Report, chap. 29

On Posada, see Webb, Dark Alliance, 253-55; and Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 31.
Posada has been identified as an associate of Philip (or Phillip) Arthur Thompson, a hitman,
suspected serial killer, and FBI informant. Thompson, during the 1980s, turned up in the
Wackenhut-Cabazon arms joint venture at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Southern
California. As discussed in chapters 8 and 9, this venture was intimately tied to, among other
things, Iran-Contra and the Inslaw affair. Thomspon had been involved in the security side of
the arrangement and had acted as bodyguard for Michael Riconosciuto. Cheri Seymour
writes that “Philip Arthur Thompson was originally sent in by Patrick Moriarty ... (Patrick
Moriarty was Michael's father’s partner of 40 years).’ Cheri Seymour, The Last Circle: Danny
Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal, 1st ed (Walterville,
OR: TrineDay, 2010), page 301

Final Report, chap. 29.

Final Report, chap. 29.

Trento, Prelude to Terror, 54.

Final Report, chap. 29.

Final Report, chap. 29.

Kohn and Monks, “Dirty Secrets.’

Colhoun, “BCCI: The Bank of the CIA,’ 17.

Brewton, The Mafia, 94.

Brewton, The Mafia, 331-57. Mike Adkinson, when he was not dealing arms, was a real estate
developer from Houston. Sometime in the early 1980s, he had fallen in with a group of
wealthy Kuwaitis. He began fronting for their real estate interests in Texas and was traveling
in and out of the Middle East in this period. This was when he reportedly became involved

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in gun-running, and Iraq was identified to have been one of the destinations of the arms he
brokered. Adkinson stated that his “rise to stardom” was thanks to Herman Beebe, the
crooked S&L player with ties to organized crime and the CIA. According to Brewton’s
sources, Adkinson was something of a front man for Beebe. One of their operations was
Skyways Aviation.

Brewton, The Mafia, 94.

Robert Parry, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press, and ‘Project Truth; (Media Consortium,
1999), 160.

“Authorities Claim Breakup of Largest Cocaine Ring,’ UPI, May 2, 1984.

On Jack Terrell and Oliver North's counterintelligence operations against him, see Peter Dale
Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Congressional Cover-Up of
Continuity of Government Planning,’ Asia-Pacific Journal, February 21, 2011; and Edmund
Berger, “Iran-Contra and Domestic Counter-Intelligence Networks,’ Reciprocal Contradiction,
May 19, 2021, https://reciprocalcontradiction.home.blog/2021/05/19/iran-contra-and-
domestic-counter-intelligence-networks/.

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Supplemental,
Minority and Additional Views, Vol. 2, 1321,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committees |/Fp2
wJHOdaélc.

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Source
Documents, Appendix A, Vol. 1, 859, https://books.google.com/books?id=hCYIFcNbYtsC.

CHAPTER 8

CLINTON CONTRA

SEAL, THE SMUGGLER

QO» October 5‘", 1986, the Enterprise took a mortal blow. At 9:50 AM, a C-

123K military transport aircraft took off from the Ilopango military base,
carrying a stockpile of rifles, ammunition, and explosives in its hull. These were to
be air-dropped into the Nicaraguan jungle for the Contras — but the plane never
made it to its destination. It was instead shot down by Sandinista forces, killing three
of the four man crew. The sole survivor, Eugene Hasenfus of Wisconsin, was
subsequently captured. Under interrogation, he began to detail what he knew of the
wide-ranging plot to arm the Contra rebels.

The first official communication surrounding the plane came through Felix
Rodriguez, who alerted Samuel Watson, an aide to Vice President Bush, that an
aircraft had gone missing. A day later, on October 6th Rodriguez contacted Watson
again with an update. Soon, Oliver North was bound for El Salvador. Meanwhile,
cover stories were being drafted in a desperate attempt to provide an alternative
explanation of events. Despite their efforts, North and the Enterprise were out of
luck and, within days, congressmen were calling for inquiries into the crash, the FBI
began nosing around Southern Air Transport’s Miami offices, and the press started
to run stories about different aspects of their clandestine activities. It was all
unraveling at a fast pace.

As with most things related to the Enterprise, mystery begat more mystery.
Hasenfus, for example, had been hired to serve as a crewman on the doomed C-
123K by a company called Corporate Air Service, which was registered in
Pennsylvania but had offices in Miami. Corporate Air was “revealed to be a phantom
company, and its Miami location was actually Southern Air Transport’s
headquarters at the Miami Airport.t

The history of the C-123K was itself a tangled web. In 1983, it had been
purchased from the US Air Force by Harry Doan, the proprietor of a Florida

aviation company called Doan Helicopters. It had been picked up by the Enterprise
in March 1986, via a front company called Udall Research Corporation. Udall,
registered in Panama, was also involved in the construction of the airstrip in the
Santa Elena region of Costa Rica. Papers recovered from North's safe described
Udall as an “operating company.”

Udall was not alone in acquiring this C-123K from Doan. It had previously
fallen into the hands of one Adler Barriman “Barry” Seal, the commercial pilot-
turned-drug smuggler and CIA asset. Seal had picked up the plane, used it for drug
smuggling flights, and then returned it to Doan Helicopters in July 1985. Seal,
importantly, was connected to the same criminal figures that had been woven into
the covert Contra support network. Beginning in 1981, Seal had begun to ferry
cocaine on behalf of Jorge Ochoa, one of the Medellin cartel’s founding members. In
a few years, Seals Medellin smuggling had expanded considerably. With police
attention mounting in his home state of Louisiana, Seal set up a new base of
operations in rural Arkansas.

The location that Seal selected was the Intermountain Municipal Airport in
Mena, Arkansas, near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. Mena was a small,
unassuming town; yet, throughout the 1980s, the area encircling the airport became
a hotbed of intrigue. In 1989, journalist John Cummings, in one of the first articles
written on Seal in Mena, wrote that “Seal had virtually taken over a local aircraft
repair-and-modification operation at the airport, and the good citizens of Mena
began to notice some strange goings on: landings at night, tight security around
Seal’s planes, a hangar converted into a virtual fortress”? There were also sightings of
what appeared to be airdrops, the construction of airstrips deep in the woods
beyond the airport, and even darker rumors that whatever was happening was
sanctioned by the CIA.

The report of the Kerry Commission on narcotics later stated that “[a] ssociates
of Seal ... were ... targets of grand jury probes into narcotics trafficking.” Yet, these
cases were dropped despite the “strong protests of State and federal law enforcement
officials..... The apparent reason,” the report continues, “was that the prosecution
might have revealed national security information.”

Jack Anderson wrote in the Washington Post that, after Seal died in 1986, IRS
investigators descended upon Mena and seized records and other documents from
the smuggler’s offices there. The IRS was keeping its report “under wraps,” but

Anderson relayed its name: “Contra Mena Connection” The absence of a public

release of this report allowed a comprehensive firewall to be set in place, permitting
investigators to quietly detail the story of Seal and that of Iran-Contra.

That the plane shot down in Nicaragua had been used by Seal was written off as
mere coincidence, with the intermediary figure, Harry Doan, acting as a convenient
buffer. Unfortunately for the proponents of this narrative, the specter of Seal appears
throughout the official documentation of the Iran-Contra case.

A May 1983 US Customs report noted that an aircraft piloted by Frank Moss
and owned by his Hondu Carib aviation company was involved in drug smuggling
linked to Barry Seal. As previously mentioned, Moss and his aviation companies
were entangled, not only with the Enterprise's Contra support efforts, but with
repeat allegations of drug trafficking. Those allegations rang true in the case of this
plane, tail number N90201, which made at least one airdrop of “large quantities of
marijuana and cocaine at an isolated farm near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The farm's
address Rt. 6, Box 282E in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, belong[ed] to Adler
[Barry] Seal...”° Given Moss’ ties to Matta’s drug trafficking operations, it seems
likely that Seal himself was part of these wider smuggling networks. It would also
align Seal with the Cali cartel in addition to his earlier Medellin ties, which paints a
complicated picture of the unstable alliances and power competitions that raged
beneath the surface of this covert world.

Journalist Daniel Hopsicker, in his biography of Barry Seal, writes that he
obtained documents from the trafficker’s widow which show that, in the 1980s, Seal
was doing business with Summit Aviation. As mentioned in the previous chapter,
Summit was controlled by the DuPont family, and was managed by Patrick Foley, a
veteran of the CIA and Flying Tiger Line. It was Summit that had provided a small
aircraft that was utilized for a bombing run in Nicaragua, while it was Foley who had
recommended a drug-smuggling pilot to the State Department for the
transportation of “humanitarian supplies” to the Contras. Foley, Hopsicker writes,
was a “Seal associate whose name and number are in Barry’s files.”

Summit was involved in the acquisition and trade of Beechcraft King Air,
turboprop planes known for their flexibility and versatility. Seal, likewise,
maintained his own King Air plane, and one, sporting the tail number N6308F, had
a particularly interesting provenance. It was owned by Greycas Inc., a Phoenix,
Arizona-based subsidiary of Greyhound Lines, the bus company. Greycas leased the
plane to a company called Systems Marketing Inc., reportedly a subsidiary of
another firm named Military Electronics. Systems Marketing provided the plane to
Gene Glick, a real estate developer who, in turn, leased it to Seal.

According to Hopsicker, Glick “leased not just this but several other of Barry
Seal’s planes and helicopters as well, during the time Seal was most active in drug
and weapons smuggling. Other documents we uncovered revealed that Glick was
also actively helping Seal purchase ocean-going vessels... ”2

Hopsicker reproduced an FAA form showing the leasing of the aircraft from
Greycas to Systems Marketing. The form identified Systems Marketing’s vice
president as a Leonard F. Lavoie. Press reports at the time suggested that Lavoie, at
this time, was also affiliated with an aviation company called Skyways Travel &
Tours, while his early career had revolved around Arizona real estate. During the
1970s, Lavoie had been the treasurer for the Halwin Corporation, which had been
founded by a man named Allen Winter.12 Winter, notably, was a “known racketeer”
who, prior to relocating to Arizona, had operated out of the Seattle area and had
been particularly close to Dave Beck - Jimmy Hoffa's mob-linked predecessor as
president of the Teamsters union.

Both Winter and Lavoie had previously worked for the major Phoenix, Arizona,
construction firm Del E. Webb Development Company.“ Del Webb had developed
major projects like Sun City, the famous retirement community; yet, what the
builder and his company were best known for was their role in building and owning
a number of Las Vegas casinos. Unsurprisingly, this brought him into close contact
with organized crime interests, and to Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky in particular -
as well as to J. Edgar Hoover. According to Anthony Summers, Hoover - who
rubbed shoulders with Webb at places like the Hotel Del Charro, a favorite haunt of
mob-linked Texas oil bigwigs like Clint Murchison — appears to have protected the
builder. “Hoover,” said Justice Department attorney William Hundley, “gave Webb a
pass. He was his buddy.”48

Hundley added that “No bugs went in on Webb’s places”

It’s unsurprising, then, that Webb himself came to own a number of casinos —
including the Sahara, which he had acquired with loans from major Wall Street
entities like Lehman Brothers and Morgan Guaranty.+® He also ended up with the
Thunderbird Hotel and the Flamingo, which means that the money of Del E. Webb
Development Company had also freely mingled with that of the Moody family’s
American National Insurance Company (ANICO).

That Lavoie appears in the chain of custody that delivered a plane from Greycas
into the hands of Barry Seal illustrates, once again, the integration of organized
crime networks into those of the intelligence community. It also makes one wonder

if Gene Glick, the builder who acquired the plane from Systems Marketing before
leasing it to Seal, was himself tied into Del Webb’s network.

Greycas itself was involved in large-scale financial crimes that also seemed
nebulously linked to individuals in Seal’s orbit: it was bilked for truly massive sums
of money by a prolific confidence man by the name of Sheldon Player. Hopsicker
writes that: “Player would sell Greycas heavy machine tools, lease them back, and
then pretend to sublease the expensive devices to end-users./® Sheldon would
pocket the money — or perhaps move it on behalf of other parties — by siphoning it
away into offshore bank accounts. According to Arthur Johnson, in his book
Breaking the Banks, Player’s preferred offshore banker was Gordon Aiton of Bank
Intercontinental Ltd. The true owners of Bank Intercontinental, located in the
Cayman Islands, are unfortunately unknown, though Aiton himself was the
Cayman’s former inspector general of banks.*8

A second company controlled by Aiton, Investment Consultants Limited, was
also involved in Sheldon Player's activities. Intriguingly, Hopsicker reproduced a
document from this very company, showing that Aiton was in communication with
Barry Seal. The document in question concerned payments and insurance for
Seal’s Lear Jet.

About a year after Moss’ airdrops at Seal’s farm, Seal had become a deeply
involved in a curious DEA sting operation. What made this sting so odd was that its
goal was propagandistic in nature: it was intended to produce concrete evidence of
collusion between the Sandinistas and the Medellin cartel. In June 1984, Seal flew -
allegedly — into Nicaragua, where he picked up a load of cocaine. The pickup was
covertly filmed and photographed, but the ongoing DEA operation quickly
derailed. General Paul F. Gorman of the US Military Southern Command,
publicly announced that evidenced had been found linking the Sandinistas to drug
traffic. However, corroboration that Seal indeed met with Sandinistas has never
been produced. While Seal wasn’t named by Gorman, he was fingered in an exposé
on the story published by the Washington Times.

This whole series of events raises a number of questions. The Southern Military
Command had been linked to arms flows to the Contras, while the Washington
Times was owned by the Unification Church — the China Lobby-aligned sect that, at
the time, was involved in private fundraising for the rebels. As Peter Dale Scott and
Jonathan Marshall note in their book Cocaine Politics, Seal and the photos from this
odd DEA operation were featured prominently in North’s notebooks and personal
diaries at the time, and North had gone out of his way to acquire copies. One note

recorded by North, based on a report from the CIA’s Duane Clarridge, stated that
“DEA thinks CIA linked info to Gorman? Did the Enterprise, or the CIA, or some
other party, intentionally disrupt the DEA operation?

Barry Seal’s life was ultimately cut short by a hail of gunfire in Baton Rouge on
February 19", 1986. The official story is that the smuggler had been taken out by
hitmen dispatched by the Medellin cartel, who had placed a bounty on Seal when it
became known that he was involved with the DEA. It’s possible, however, that there
were other actors in play.

As Daniel Hopsicker reported, rumors have abounded that the source of the hit
was really the CIA, or Oliver North, or even George H.W. Bush. It was alleged, for
instance, that Seal had considerable evidence of the Vice President’s sons, George
W. and Jeb Bush, receiving a large amount of cocaine.*2 Bob Thommasson, a
Louisiana State Police officer, told Hopsicker that the FBI had taken charge of the
crime scene and removed boxes from the trunk of Seal’s car — boxes that contained
“very very compelling documents and tapes”?

There is also the question of the weapon used in the hit. It had been sourced
from Jose Coutin, the owner of a gun store and fashion boutique in Miami.” Coutin
had been one of many CIA-trained Cuban exiles, having served in Brigade 2506,
though it is unknown if he participated in Bay of Pigs. In the 1980s, he was deeply
involved in Contra support activities - and had been flipped into acting as an FBI
informant. Through the information that he provided to the Bureau, we know that
he was acquainted with a number of key players. These included the principals of
Frigorificos, the Colombian cartel front company contracted by the State
Department; the CIA and cartel-linked rancher in Costa Rica, John Hull; Tom
Posey of Civilian Materiel Assistance, the militia-special forces group tied to the
Enterprise and to John K. Singlaub; and Jack Terrell, the early Iran-Contra
whistleblower.

Barry Seals untimely death didn’t put an end to the goings-on in Mena,
however. Russell Welch, a state police investigator who had been monitoring Seal,
noted that in 1987 there was a spate of “new activity at the [Mena] airport with the
appearance of ... an Australian business ... and C-130s had appeared.”2®

There were in fact two Australian companies, Southern Cross Aviation Inc. and
Multi-Trade, that had set up shop in Mena in the immediate post-Seal years.74
Southern Cross was an aircraft ferrying company with an apparent specialty in
moving C-130s, while Multi-Trade was an aircraft interiors business. The two shared
several common principals, who in turn took an active interest in the aircraft being

stored at Mena. One of Multi-Trade’s executives, a former Australian air force pilot
named Glen Conrad, held a stake in one C-130 that he subsequently sold to a
company in Florida called African Air Trans Inc. Florida business records show that
African Air was owned by Henry A. Warton, a fairly well-known pilot and smuggler
with known ties to the CIA. African Air Trans Inc. is mentioned again in the next
chapter as the C-130 it bought was tied to another CIA-linked company, E-Systems.

In December 1988, the C-130 took off from Mena, destined for somewhere in
Africa. It was seized by US Customs in Florida. Press reports from 1991 state that
the plane had been “accused of violating regulations on trafficking arms,” and that
Warton’s company was actually a dummy front set up to obscure the real owner. The
plane had actually been acquired, the article continues, by “an unnamed Israeli living
in Panama who set up a fake American corporation and mortgage on the aircraft to
‘cover his ass."28

Several years later, in the summer of 1991, another C-130 linked to Mena met
an odd fate. It crashed on a runaway in Luanda, the capital city of Angola, killing all
onboard — including Chuck Hendricks, a 34 year old aircraft mechanic from
Arkansas.*2 Hendricks’ parents, who lived in Mena, set out to learn what happened
to their son, only to be confronted with a web of mysteries. The C-130 had been
owned by a Delaware company called CZX Productions, and the crew had been
hired by a German firm called Unitrann International. Both of these companies, in
turn, were controlled by a shadowy German aviation specialist named Dietrich
Reinhardt.

Reinhardt’s name will be instantly recognizable to those familiar with the Iran-
Contra affair. One of the companies he controlled, St. Lucia Airways, had been
utilized by the Enterprise to ferry weapons to the Middle East. According to Albert
Hakim, St. Lucia was a CIA proprietary firm. If Reinhardt was involved with
aircraft from Mena as late as 1991, it seems that whatever was taking place in
Arkansas was an ongoing operation.

DOWN IN ARKANSAS

He Springs, Arkansas, was, to quote Roger Morris, the “Geneva of organized

crime in the 1920s and 30s. It’s where the barons, the gangster bosses came to
meet”?! That association certainly continued through the decades. Influence over
the city, considered a neutral territory for the different, often-competing criminal

gangs, families and outfits, was held by Owney Madden, a New York gangster whose

distinctive nickname was “The Killer.” Madden was reportedly something of an
ambassador for Meyer Lansky and counted among his close associates Frank
Costello, who popped up in Hot Springs from time to time. New Orleans crime boss
Carlos Marcello was reported to have held significant influence over Hot Springs as
well.

There is some evidence, albeit circumstantial, that a young Bill Clinton might
have had contact with these forces while he growing up in Arkansas. The man that
Clinton had often referred to as “the most commanding male presence in his life”
and a “father figure” was his uncle, Raymond Clinton.22 Outwardly, Uncle Raymond
ran a profitable car dealership, but he was also known to have engaged in various
vices and backroom wheeling and dealing. According to a former Arkansas FBI
agent, Raymond “ran some slot machines that he had scattered about town,” while
close business associates have admitted that the car dealer had “considerable
dealings in the underworld.”=2

Along the way, Raymond began to collect political power. He cultivated ties to
the state’s Democratic Party, but also political figures in surrounding states, like
Alabama's George Wallace.

These ties paid off in a big way for Bill Clinton in 1968. It was a big year for Bill:
he had just won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom,
and he was on the verge of being drafted. Being shipped off to war in Vietnam would
have derailed Oxford entirely - and so Uncle Raymond leapt into action. Using his
political connections, he was able to secure for Bill a draft deferral. *#

Uncle Raymond tended to crop up at opportune moments such as these, where
Clinton's political destiny seemed to hang in the balance. In 1974, when Bill
embarked on his first political campaign for Arkansas’ House of Representatives,
Raymond arranged for a $10,000 loan for his nephew from the First National Bank
of Hot Springs. While Bill would lose the race, two years later he secured a position
as Arkansas’ Attorney General. This was the springboard for his next venture, the
1978 campaign for governor. This campaign was a success, thanks in no small part to
loans and donations from Arkansas’ economic elite. Here, once again, one could
find the name of Raymond Clinton.

In addition to the assistance provided by Uncle Raymond and his friends,
Clinton may have had other benefactors who helped shape his early political
education, if not his career itself. There are hints, rumors, and intimations of a
relationship with the CIA during the 1970s, particularly during his year at Oxford,
which had been secured with the aid of Raymond. A former CIA officer told Roger

Morris and Sally Denton that he had seen Clinton’s name on a list of informants
used by the Agency’s Operation CHAOS - the surveillance program aimed at the
anti-war and civil rights movements. Another officer stated that “part of Clinton's
arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft.”>>
Reportedly, Clinton was regularly debriefed by the CIA, who he supplied with
information concerning activist groups on British campuses.

The underworld figures like Barry Seal who haunted Mena seemed to always
operate with much less than six degrees of separation from Clinton during his time
as the state’s governor. In his 1999 confessional expose, Cross-fire: Witness in the
Clinton Investigation, former Arkansas policeman turned personal driver and security
guard for Bill Clinton, L.D. Brown, recounts how Clinton encouraged him to seek
out a post at the CIA.*° Clinton allegedly went so far as to edit the essay Brown
wrote for this employment application. The essay topic was drug smuggling in
Central America. Upon receiving his application, the CIA put Brown in touch with
none other than Seal.

Seal was far from being the only afhliate of Oliver North running a Contra-
connected operation in Arkansas. Terry Reed, who had worked for North since
1983, claimed to have been put in touch with Seal by North and established a base
just 10 miles north of Mena - in Nella, Arkansas — where “Nicaraguan Contras and
other recruits from Latin American were trained in resupply missions, night
landings, precision paradrops and similar maneuvers,’ according to Alexander
Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Reed charges that another figure in this circle (with particularly close ties to
Seal) was Dan Lasater.*® Lasater was the ultimate Little Rock operator. During the
day, he was renowned for his lucrative bond brokerage business, Lasater and
Company; while, after nightfall, he had a reputation as a party animal. Lasater was
plugged into the world of Arkansas cocaine, something he shared with his close
friend, Roger Clinton. Roger was, of course, the brother of then-Governor Bill
Clinton. It was revealed during the course of the Whitewater investigations that
Roger Clinton had even spent several years working for Lasater.*2

Just like his close friends, scandal seemed to follow Lasater. In 1977, his private
jet turned up in Las Vegas with Jimmy Chagra, a prominent drug trafficker, onboard.
(Two years later, Chagra contracted hitman Charles Harrelson to assassinate Federal
Judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas.)*2

Several years later, in 1984, Lasater purchased a ski resort in a remote northern
corner of New Mexico. According to journalists Denton and Morris, Lasater “was

given free rein to use Bill Clinton’s name commercially to help promote the isolated
development.” They continue:

Undercover law enforcement agents later found the resort a center for drug running, what US
customs called a “large controlled-substance smuggling operation and large-scale money-
laundering activity.” While Lasater held “Arkansas Week” at the resort with Governor Clinton's
endorsement and entertained politicians from Santa Fe as well as Little Rock, local New Mexico
sheriffs were hearing reports from Angel Fire reminiscent of Mena - strange nighttime traffic,
sightings of parachute drops, even hikers’ accounts of a “big black military-type cargo plane”
seeming to come out of nowhere and swooping low and almost silently over a deserted mountain

meadow near the remote ski area tL

Rumors of drug trafficking, money laundering, powerful military connections
and the shadowy presence of military activity grew throughout the latter half of the
1980s and into the early 1990s. A tantalizing early reference to an “Arkansas project”
connected to the Iran-Contra affair can be found in a legal declaration drafted by
Daniel Sheehan in connection with the lawsuit he brought against the Enterprise on
behalf of journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey.*2

This “project” was reportedly a scheme to set up a training facility for anti-
Communist insurgents — in this case, Laotian tribesmen. A key witness in Sheehan's
lawsuit, Gene Wheaton, identified some of the backers of this project as Rick Wade,
a private citizen from Alaska; William Bode, a State Department employee whose
name appeared in Oliver North’s personal notebooks; and Vaughn Forrester, an
assistant to the pro-Contra Congressman William McCollum; and CIA officer Carl
Jenkins. “Some managers of the Daisy Air Rifle Company,’ writes Sheehan,
“provided property in western Arkansas for the training camp.”8

That there was interest in training Laotian tribesmen for anti-communist
purposes isn’t as strange as it might sound. In the early 1980s, prior to the spin-up of
the Enterprise, the National Security Council ran an off-the-books operation aimed
at supporting Laotian anti-communists that was financed via private donations to a
slew of POW-MIA groups.“ Many of the donors — including Nelson Bunker Hunt
and Ellen Garwood - would subsequently emerge as major private donors to the
Enterprise. And much like the case of private donations to the Contras, money for
the Laotian operation moved through familiar banks. One of these was none other
than Seoul branch of BCCI. This money, as reported in a memo by Senate
investigator John Mattes, “was used to arm Laotian resistance groups in a covert
network ‘run by members of the NSC."48

Rick Wade, the private citizen named by Wheaton, had been active in the
POW/MIA movement, and was likely connected to the NSC’s operations. During

the 1980s, he had developed contacts with aides to Vang Pao, the Hmong opium
warlord that had been so close to Ted Shackley and his team a decade prior. He
became a lobbyist for the Hmong in Washington and elsewhere, and would meet
with figures like Ellen Garwood and Robert Owen in order to garner materiel
support for the tribesmen.*°

Gene Wheaton himself is an intriguing figure. A former Army criminal
investigator and intelligence agent, Wheaton was on the periphery of the internal
core of the Enterprise, and was thus privy to many covert operations unfolding
during the 1980s.“4 His name appears within North’s notebooks alongside those of
Carl Jenkins, the CIA officer who had served under Shackley at JM/WAVE and in
Laos.

Wheaton and Jenkins were close friends and business associates — they were
both attached, at one point in the mid-1980s, to an air freight company called
National Air Cargo - and it was through Jenkins that Wheaton found himself
enmeshed in the world of the Enterprise. Jenkins, as mentioned in chapter 6, was
connected with Charles Haynes and Vaughn “Bobby” Ross via a web of companies
likely linked to covert operations. Ross, in turn, was a close associate of Barry Seal.

Attempts to investigate Clinton's role in these sorts of operations and more
broadly in the Iran-Contra affair were scuttled by Clintons confidantes, who
consistently denied he played a role in the scandal. According to the Wall Street
Journal, former IRS investigator William Duncan teamed up with Arkansas State
Police Investigator Russell Welch in what became a decade-long battle to bring the
matter to light.*8 Yet, of the nine separate state and federal probes into the affair, all
were shut down.

Duncan would later say of the investigations, “[They] were interfered with and
covered up, and the justice system was subverted.” A 1992 memo from Duncan to
high-ranking members of the attorney generals staff notes that Duncan was
instructed “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney
general's office.” The attorney general, serving under George H.W.Bush, at that time,
was William Barr. As mentioned before, Barr had been a former CIA officer before
then joining the Agency-linked law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge.

Reed alleged that one of the CIA's point men in the Arkansas operations was a
man who claimed to be the general counsel for Southern Air Transport and went by
the name Robert Johnson. Johnson seemed to give Governor Clinton his marching
orders, and was particularly incensed when Bill's wayward brother, Roger Clinton,
was busted in 1985 for peddling cocaine. As previously mentioned, Roger's

penchant for cocaine was one he shared directly with Lasater, who testified that the
two had frequently indulged in the drug together.

Johnson reportedly told Clinton that he was “Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy” and
that Arkansas had been the CIA's “greatest asset.” Johnson went on to deliver to
Clinton the following message: “Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless
you fuck up and do something stupid, you're No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the
job that you've always wanted. You and guys like you are the fathers of the new
government. We are the new covenant.”

According to Terry Reed, who witnessed these happenings, he would later learn
that Robert Johnson was none other than William Barr. These allegations place
Barr's use of the alias Robert Johnson in an interim period where little is known
about Barr's activities — he had served as Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy
in the Reagan White House until September 1983, and then had joined President
Bush's Justice Department in 1989. As previously discussed, it was between the
months of September and October 1983 that Casey’s pre-Enterprise support for the
Contras began moving in a concrete way, and it was also in this same period that
Manuel Noriega had entered the picture. The answers that Barr provided to the
Senate Judiciary Committee states that between 1983 and 1989, he had returned to
the CIA-linked firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, and in 1985 had become
a partner at that firm.22

As for Roger Clinton, after he was released from prison in 1986, he went to
work at Calumet Farms, a Horse Farm in Lexington, Kentucky Calumet’s owner,
J.T. Lundy, had been a longtime friend and business partner of Lasater, who was
something a big name in the inner circle of Lexington’s elite. Lundy boasted his own
roster of organized crime contacts. One figure who flickered in and out of Calumet
was Robert Libutti, a brash “New Jersey gambler, racehorse consultant” and
associate of the Gambino crime family.>* All in all, it was an interesting environment
for a politician's brother out on parole who was ostensibly seeking to clean up his
act.

Just across the street from Calumet were a pair of curious horse farms. One was
owned by Nelson Bunker Hunt, of the Dallas Hunt family, who had been one of
Oliver North’s prominent private Contra donors. Next door was Murty Farms,
purchased in 1984 by fellow Texan - and fraternity brother of Nelson Hunt -
George Aubin. Aubin was part of the savings and loan crowd down in Texas, and
was something of a mentor to a mega-borrower named John Riddle. Besides looting
S&Ls, Riddle had a taste for aviation, which was expressed through his ownership of

a company called First Western Airline. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, First
Western “was used as a cutout by the Israelis and the CIA to transport American
arms to the Middle East.’=4

Additional information about the Mena operations was provided in a
deposition given by the controversial Iran-Contra whistleblower Richard Brenneke.
His allegations, made in the summer of 1991, were recently summarized in a lawsuit
filed on behalf of Linda Ives, the mother of Kevin Ives. Kevin's body was found,
along with that of his friend Dan Henry, on train tracks near Alexander, Arkansas,
under exceedingly strange circumstances.°= According to this summary, Brenneke
claimed that he had flown “10 to 12 flights of a C-130 into the Mena, Arkansas,
airport” and “took guns and paramilitary forces from Mena to Panama.”*° Cocaine
was being flown back from Latin America to the Mena airport, where it was
dispersed to, among others, representatives from New York City organized crime.

One of the most fascinating parts of Brenneke’s allegations is that he moved
money that had been paid by the organized crime figures for the drugs into accounts
in a Panamanian bank held in the name of International Fund for Mergers and
Acquisitions (IFMA), a company where he was acting as vice president. IFMA was
reportedly not only utilized by the CIA, but by Michael Harari, Mossad’s man in
Panama, to launder money and arrange arms shipments in Latin America.°2 The
company’s president was Ramon d’Onofrio, a businessman with a long track record
of shady deals and bankruptcies.°2 A New York Times article identified d’Onofrio as a
business associate of Alfred Buhler, a lawyer from Lichtenstein, who was reported by
the paper as being protected by the CIA itself?

Another d’Onofrio business partner was Charles Hurwitz, the bigtime
corporate raider who, from his humble beginnings as a prominent commodities
trader Bache & Co., had developed extensive holdings ranging from the Kaiser
Aluminum Corporation to Arkansas real estate to the United Financial Group
(UFG), the largest S&L in Texas. Hurwitz filled UFG’s asset sheets with junk
bonds peddled by Drexel Burnham Lambert, which also owned a 10% stake in the
S&L. This wasn’t Hurwitz’s only involvement with the Drexel Burnham junk bond
kings: a sale of $450 million worth of junk bonds were sold to help a Hurwitz
company, Maxxam, take over California’s Pacific Lumber.

UFG was subsequently bought by the New York bonds trader and financier
Lewis Ranieri, who appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s contact book with eight phone
numbers and two addresses listed. Ranieri is best known for his role in developing
the first market for mortgage-backed securities.

Hurwitz, while he was still riding high on Drexel’s runaway junk bond train,
developed several business ventures with the mob-linked S&L bigwig from
Louisiana, Herman Beebe. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Beebe had,
during the 1970s, owned a warehouse where explosives destined for Cuban exiles
were stored — explosives that were meant to be moved by Barry Seal, prior to a
Customs sting.

Herman Beebe had a tendency to appear at the same S&Ls where Mario Renda
could also be found. Renda, as noted in the previous chapter, was Adnan
Khashoggi’s friend with a penchant for seeding fraudulent borrowing with Teamster
pension fund deposits. A list of banks controlled or suspected of being controlled by
Beebe from a 1985 Comptroller of the Currency report included Mainland Savings
of Houston. This is the same S&L where Renda had brokered deposits and where
Khashoggi had involved himself in an aforementioned series of bewildering deals.
Were Renda and Beebe operating in concert?

A smoking gun is hard to discern, but the two both hung out — and arranged
deals — at the La Costa resort in Southern California. La Costa, as noted in chapter
1, had long been a mob hang-out; it had been built with the aid of Teamster pension
fund loans, and Burton Kanter was listed as the resort’s agent at the time it was
incorporated.

Beebe had other potential ties to Iran-Contra. The same Comptroller of the
Currency report that named Beebe-linked banks also listed Palmer National Bank in
Washington DC.& If Beebe did control Palmer, it was hidden. The bank’s founder
was Stefan Halper, a DC bureaucrat who had held various positions within the
Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. Halper's father-in-law was Ray Cline, the
old OSS and CIA veteran who, at the time, was working with John Singlaub of
GeoMiliTech.

Palmer was also where the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty,
the Contra fundraising apparatus set up by Spitz Channell on behalf of the
Enterprise, held its bank accounts. According to internal NEPL documents acquired
by Pete Brewton from the National Security Archives in DC, the NEPL maintained
accounts at only one other bank: Irving Trust, the New York City-based commercial
bank. Irving Trust was also the major financier, alongside Drexel Burnham Lambert,
of Charles Hurwitz’s Pacific Lumber takeover. Irving Trust which subsequently be
purchased by Bank of New York with the aid of Bruce Rappaport. Bank of New York
and Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank (IMB) would become intertwined when the
stake held by BCCI in IMB was purchased by BNY.

Irving Trust also maintained a branch in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the late
1970s, an intern at this branch was James T. Riady, the son of a prominent
Indonesian banker and businessman named Mochtar Riady. Together, the Riady
family, originally from China's Fujian province, and their close relationship with
another giant of Arkansas business, Jackson Stephens, would become crucial to
understanding what exactly was happening in Arkansas during Clinton's time as
governor.

BANK BUILDING

he last time we encountered Jackson Stephens, he was aiding BCCI’s takeover

of First General Bankshares - later rechristened as First American Bankshares
— and its subsidiary, National Bank of Georgia. He had been brought into the fold
through his friendship with one of NBG’s big shareholders who had been courted
by BCCI, Bert Lance, who Stephens had brought to Arkansas with some of BCCI’s
representatives for negotiations over the purchases.

When Lance began searching for buyers of his NBG stock, BCCI wasn't the
only interested party that he brought to Stephens’ attention. There was also Mochtar
Riady, a politically-connected Indonesian banker and financier who commanded
the Bank of Central Asia, “the third largest private banking firm in Indonesia” that
held some $100 million in assets.°° In the years to come, the wealth of Mochtar and
his son, James Riady, would swell into the billions, all marshaled under the auspices
of an umbrella corporation called the Lippo Group. Their meteoric ascension was
thanks in no small part to the strategic partnership the Riadys had with Jackson
Stephens and Stephens Inc., which developed soon after the Indonesians dropped
out of the NBG purchase.

How Riady first entered the picture is telling. According to various press reports,
Riady had been introduced to Stephens by Bert Lance, while Lance had first come
into contact with Riady through an introduction made by Robert B. Anderson, a
once-well regarded figure in politics who had become a specialist in offshore
banking. Anderson and Riady, meanwhile, had been brought together several years
prior by an unnamed executive from New York City’s Chemical Bank.

Chemical, at the time, had established a significant presence in south-east Asia:
it had opened branches in Hong Kong; maintained business operations in
Singapore; and in Indonesia, it had embarked in a joint venture with the Riady
family. Chemical Bank would ultimately maintain a long-running alliance with

Riady interests. In 1988, their joint venture expanded when they teamed up with
Royal Bank of Scotland and Jardine Fleming (a Hong Kong partnership between the
merchant houses Jardine Matheson and Robert Fleming & Co.) to set up the
Multinational Finance Corp, or Multicor. According to Mochtar, Multicor was set
up first and foremost to “expand Bank Central Asias financing channels and
financing capabilities.”

While Riady was toying with buying into National Bank of Georgia,
commentators and regulators began to suspect that something else was afoot. One
common concern was that Riady wasn’t acting alone, and that he was serving as a
front for Indonesian political interests that hoped to gain political and economic
leverage in the United States.

Interestingly, in this same period, William Casey had a series of dealings with
Indonesian interests. These activities later came back to haunt Casey during his
confirmation hearings for the CIA, when he was questioned if he had failed to
register as a foreign agent for Indonesia.

When he was working in the private sector as an attorney for Rogers & Wells — a
time discussed extensively in chapter 6 — Casey took on as clients a complex of
interrelated Indonesian interests.© There was Pertamina, the country’s state-owned
oil company, and the Ramayana Indonesian Restaurant in New York City. There was
also Indonesian Enterprises Inc., a holding company that had been set up for the
restaurant. Pertamina was the major interest in this holding company, holding all of
its Class B stock. Indonesian Enterprises issued Class A stock, in turn, to various
banks and oil companies that were doing business with Pertamina.

Holders of Class A stock included Bruce Rappaport’s InterMaritime Bank,
which was engaged in a convoluted succession of fraudulent tanker chartering deals
with Pertamina. Elias Kulukundis, mentioned previously as a close business
associate of Edward Carey, was also involved in these chartering activities.
Investment capital from Kulukundis and Rappaport further mingled in the tanker
companies of a “mystery man” named Steven Davids-Morelle, whose Tankers
International Navigation Corporation joined Pertamina’s tanker chartering and in
the purchase of Indonesian Enterprises Inc. stock.

Was there any sort of connection between Casey’s relationship with Indonesian
interests and Anderson’s encounter with the Riadys? The picture is murky, and
records of Anderson’s own Indonesian activities isn’t readily accessible. What is
certain, however, is that Anderson was another member, alongside Rappaport, of
Caseys “Hardy Boys” clique, which is certainly suggestive that some sort of

collusion was taking place. Furthermore, the list of Indonesian Enterprises, Inc's
Class A stockholders includes Dresser Industries — the Texas oil concern closely
intertwined with Bush family interests - where Anderson had sat on the board of
directors.

It is worth diving a little deeper into Anderson's biography before returning to
Stephens and Riady, because it is both an illustrative case of high-level political
corruption and also intersects in numerous ways with key figures in this ongoing
history. With a background in law, Anderson had served in a number of mid-level
bureaucratic positions in Texas in the 1930s, including stints as the state’s Assistant
Attorney General and as the state tax commissioner. In 1937, he became the general
counsel for the W.T. Waggoner estate, headquartered in Vernon, Texas. The
Waggoner estate was a large ranching empire that extended its reaches into banking
and various other industries, real estate development and the like.

The Waggoner family, like many of the great Texas clans, was a source of
political clout, and Anderson was soon found mingling with the Texan elite. One
impressive early encounter was his purchase of the KTBC radio station, which he
then sold to Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, Lyndon Johnson's wife, in 1943. It
subsequently became a major source of revenue for the Johnson family. Anderson
also acted as a lobbyist for powerful Texas oil interests, and was particularly close to
early industry giants like Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, and the Bass family. He
could also be found at the helm of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association of
Texas, which brought together a wide range of businessmen involved in all different
aspects of oil production.

At the urging of these deep-pocketed petroleum interests, Anderson was
brought into the Eisenhower administration. In 1953, he was made Secretary of the
Navy, and a year later he moved and became the Deputy Secretary of Defense. In
1955, he left government and took a position as president of Ventures Ltd., a
Canadian mining company controlled mostly by American and British industrial
and financial interests, before returning to the public sector again as Eisenhower's
Secretary of the Treasury. There, he arranged for lucrative tax relief packages for
Texas oil. By 1961, he was back in the private sector again, this time managing his
own business consultancy — the Anderson Group -— located at Rockefeller Plaza. He
also joined on as a limited partner at Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co., the Wall Street
brokerage firm that was closely interlinked with Bronfman interests (the Loeb-
Bronfman connection will be discussed in chapter 11).

During his time with Loeb, Rhoades & Co., Anderson developed two important
connections. The first was to Bank of America, which was central to the later
development of BCCI. In 1964, Anderson joined forces with Bank of America and
Belgium’s Banque Lambert to set up the World Banking Corporation, an offshore
facility in Bermuda that was set up for dealing in the emerging Eurodollars market.4
That same year, he joined Bank of America’s council of advisors.

He also forged ties with Rockefeller interests. He had been connected to the
Rockefellers during his time in the Eisenhower administration — if not earlier, given
the presence of the Rockefeller family in Texas. Then, during the mid-1960s, he
became an investment advisor for Standard Oil of Indiana. In 1969, this led
Anderson, acting on behalf of Standard, to set up an investment consortium in
partnership with Maurice Tempelsman, a major player in the international diamond
market, that would push for American-led interests in the Congo.

Tempelsman, interestingly, had ties to American intelligence. With numerous
interests across Africa, he recruited veterans of the Agency to navigate that world. As
Arthur Levy points out, “In the 1960s Tempelsman hired as his business agent the
CIA station chief in Kinshasa, Larry Devlin, who helped put Mobuto into power
and afterward served as his personal advisor”.

There was yet another line leading from Tempelsman to Casey’s “Hardy Boys”
that was independent of Anderson. According to Alan Block, one of Rappaport’s top
lieutenants, Jerry Townsend, was a “former” CIA officer who had worked in Turkey,
Zambia, and Burundi with Tempelsman. Block adds that “Tempelsman was part of
Rappaport’s group, according to Townsend?”

Then there were the ties between Anderson and the banking circles around
BCCI. In the early 1980s, he was found on the board of the Paris-based Saudi
European Bank, which was owned by the BCCI-linked Saudi European Investment
Corporation N.V. Other principals in the Saudi European Bank included John
Connally, the former governor of Texas and George Shultz’s predecessor in the
Nixon administration as Treasury Secretary. When Connally was running against
Reagan in the early days of the Republican presidential campaign against Carter,
Bechtel had initially backed him before switching to support the eventual president.
Connally, at that point, embarked on a voyage as a real estate developer, partnering
with the infamously corrupt Ben Barnes — also a former Texan politician — in deals
that involved tapping a slew of savings and loans for fraudulent loans.

The S&L connection to Saudi European was strong. Its board also counted with
the presence of Charles Keating, whose American Continental Corporation and

Lincoln Savings and Loan, pumped out bad loans at an astounding rate after the
Reagan administration led the deregulation of the S&L industry. Keating and
Connally were close, with the banker having served at first as Connally’s West coast
finance chairman during his political campaign, followed by a shorter stint as
campaign manager. Interestingly, one of Connally’s campaign workers, Joyce
Downey, later went to work for Connally and Barnes before relocating to Arizona,
where she worked as the office manager for John Singlaub’s US Council for World
Freedom, the American branch of WACL.2 USCWE happened to be located next
door to the headquarters of Keating’s American Continental Corporation.

In 1984, Keating’s Lincoln Savings invested $18 million into Saudi European’s
holding company, the Saudi European Investment Corp. Keating then joined
Saudi European’s international advisory board, while Saudi European began issuing
lines of credit to Keating’s companies. According to a report in the Los Angeles
Times, the “bank and its parent company acted as sham financiers and buyers in
Keating’s efforts to book profits at Lincoln” Z A subsidiary of Lincoln called Amcor
Investments — which was involved in several complicated real estate arrangements
with John Connally — sold an option it held to Saudi European in order to buy a
“profits interest” in General Oriental Securities Limited, an offshore corporation set
up by the corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith for takeover purposes.“ Goldsmith,
as previously mentioned, was part of the Clermont Club and was also one of the
main businessman, along with Robert Maxwell, sought out by Rothschild Inc. to
help the elite banking family expand its influence in the US financial system.”

In December 1986, Keating, utilizing a subsidiary of his American Continental
Corporation called Dungiven, organized a Bahamian investment corporation called
Trendinvest.®2 Joining the board of directors was one of the busiest man in shadow
banking, Alfred Hartmann, who could also be found alongside Anderson, Keating
and Connally at the Saudi European Bank. Among the other stakeholders in
Trendinvest was Gesellschaft Fur Trend Analysen, a West German firm that
specialized in computerized currency trading, and Royork and Company, a
subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada. Through this offshore vehicle, Keating was
able to funnel tens of millions of S&L money out the United States - money that, in
the end, had to be paid back by the US taxpayer. Thus, the fact that Riady’s meeting
of Bert Lance, and by extension Jackson Stephens, was made by Anderson, reveals
the type of networks that enabled the Riady-Stephens partnership.

The story of Jackson Stephens is inseparable from Arkansas’ longest running
and most prestigious law firm, Rose Law. Rose’s beginnings went back to the 1820s,

when Arkansas was still a territory instead of a state. One of its founders was Robert
Crittenden, a Kentucky-born lawyer who had been appointed by President James
Monroe to act as the governor of the Arkansas territories. His partner was Chester
Ashley, one of Arkansas’ very first senators. From these beginnings, Rose Law was
woven into the fabric of the state itself, and remained closely tied to the Arkansas’
political and economic elite.

Arkansas, to quote journalist L.J. Davis, boasted a “ruling oligarchy, a small and
relatively powerless middle class and a disenfranchised, leaderless populace.”®+

Through the 1970s and into the late 1980s, a period which saw Stephens’ star
rise in Arkansas, Rose was headed by C. Joseph Giroir. In addition to his status as a
high-powered attorney, Giroir was a specialist in securities. In the 1960s, Giroir
worked far from Arkansas, in the offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission
in Washington, DC. While little is known about his activities in the capital, what is
certain is that, when he returned to his home state, he brought with him an
adamantly pro-business outlook and a drive for modernization.

Once settled at Rose, he went about upgrading Rose’s home-spun inclinations
for the nascent information age. “He brought the firm billable hours, computers and
high-premium securities work, then got in trouble with his side business — buying
and selling banks while wearing too many hats for his shallow pockets, and using
Rose lawyers to do the work.”®4

One particularly controversial banking escapade in which Giroir was embroiled
involved a string of borrowing from a fraud-riddled savings and loan in Pine Bluff,
Arkansas, called FirstSouth. Regulators were intrigued by whatever relationship
Giroir had with the S&L. While he was dipping into their loan basket, he had also
become a stakeholder in First-South and was writing legal advice to the S&L on
paper with a Rose Law letterhead. FirstSouth, by the time it collapsed in 1986, had
doled out a big pile of loans that were never paid back. Among their biggest
borrowers — and defaulters - was Clint Murchison Jr., the organized crime-linked
Texas oil player.*+

A small group of lawyers who worked under Giroir would later become
powerful actors in state and federal politics and, while at Rose, they were involved
with the firm’s strangest dealings. This group was composed of Webster Hubbell,
who would become Associate Attorney General under President Clinton; Clinton's
future White House counsel Vince Foster; and the soon-to-be First Lady, Hillary
Rodham Clinton. This trio, like their boss, had an appetite for shady business
dealings. All three were partners in a company called Midlife Investors, which had

been set up in the early 1980s by E.F. Hutton. “Hubbell, Foster and Rodham
Clinton each kicked in $15,000 and named each other — rather than their spouses —
as beneficiaries.”®° Through Midlife, the trio dumped money into companies being
targeted by corporate takeover artists like James Goldsmith.

Clinton in particular liked to haunt the corporate boardrooms and offices, often
spending more time working on business affairs than the daily law work demanded
by Rose. As L.J. Davis writes,

She was only one of two Rose partners to act as a corporate director, serving at various times on
the boards of four companies and earning $64,700 in 1991 from director's fees alone. (Her 1991
salary from Rose was in the vicinity of $110,000; her husband earned $35,000 and got to live in a
free house.) She was on the board of Wal-Mart, a Rose client that Stephens had launched on the
road to glory. (Rodham Clinton also owned $80,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock.) She served
Southern Development Bancorp, a holding company created to give development loans in rural
Arkansas, which, according to the Washington Post, paid Rose somewhere between $100,000 and
$200,000 in fees. In 1989 she joined the board of TCBY yogurt company, which occupies the
tallest building in Little Rock. TCBY then proceeded to pay Rose $750,000 for legal work during

the next few years. 86

Such was the backdrop to the grand ambitions of Stephens and Riady for a
sprawling business complex. Not satisfied with playing in Arkansas alone, the pair
made a very early stop-over in Macau, where they bought up massive blocks of stock
in the storied Seng Heng Bank, which allowed them to gain full control over the
company.®2 The sellers had been the trio of Cheng Yu-tung, Ho Yin, and Lu Daohe.
Cheng had been the founder of two interlinked Hong Kong-based conglomerates,
Chow Tai Fook Enterprises and New World Development Company Limited.
Through these two large corporations, he had become one of the city’s richest
individuals. Cheng was very close to Stanley Ho, another Hong Kong billionaire
who held the monopoly over Macau's casino industries. In 1989, Stephens and
Riady, curiously enough, sold Seng Heng to STDM, a company controlled by
Stanley Ho.88 Ho will appear again later, in chapter 16, as one of his close business
partners, Ng Lap Seng, was a key figure in the so-called Chinagate scandal of the
mid-1990s.

Cheng’s associate in Seng Heng, Ho Yin, is worth examining briefly. Like Cheng
and Stanley Ho, Ho Yin was another Hong Kong-based businessman with
numerous Macau holdings. What he was most infamous for, however, was his role in
Macau's illicit gold trade, which flourished due to international regulations
governing gold markets from the end of World War II through the early 1970s. His
particular largess derived from the ties he had cultivated with the nascent Chinese

Communist Party, having made contacts with Mao and Zhou Enlai shortly after the
revolution.

His work managing funds for the Party earned him a spot among the so-called
“Red Fat Cats,’ and he even held a position on the Standing Committee of the
Chinese National People’s Congress. In Macau, meanwhile, he ran multiple public
companies and for a time served as vice president of the Macau Legislative
Assembly. He also ran numerous businesses, including multiple banks, through
which his gold trade flowed. Among these banks was Seng Heng. Until 1974, when
gold trading was deregulated, “$40-50 million worth of gold passed through the
narrow door of Seng Heng annually”? All in all, this made a very interesting
purchase on the part of Stephens and Riady.

Seng Heng wasn't the only bank the duo bought in 1983. That was also the year
they began purchasing the stake held by Midland, Texas, oilman John Hendrix in
the First Arkansas Bankstock Corporation (FABCO). As part of the deal, FABCO
issued additional stock that could be purchased exclusively by Stephens and Riady;
combined with Hendrix’s holding, Stephens Inc. and Lippo achieved control over
FABCO as a joint venture. This takeover granted them control over a wide
network of Arkansas banks that were held by FABCO. These included Worthen
Bank & Trust Co of Little Rock, First National Bank of Hots Springs, the National
Credit Corp of Pine Bluff, and the First National Bank of Mena.”

That the latter bank was located in the same town where the CIA had set up
shop and where drug smuggling was taking place raises all sorts of questions.

However, at the same time, the acquisition of these banks was part of a wider
effort by Stephens and Riady to build out an Arkansas banking empire. They turned
to Joseph Giroir, the head of the Rose Law Firm, to lobby for changes in state laws
that restricted the range of activities that bank holding companies could carry out.
Giroir then purchased several banks, which were subsequently sold to Stephens and
Riady. For his efforts, Giroir received money, a large block of Worthen stock, and a
spot on Worthen’s board. Rose Law became counsel to Worthen, and the bank itself
was transformed into something of a flagship for Stephens’ interests.

CLINTON’S DEVELOPMENT MACHINE

iG late 1984, Governor Bill Clinton unveiled an ambitious economic development
plan for the state of Arkansas. It was a sterling example of Clinton's commitment
to a “pro-business” vision of government, and a direct foreshadowing of the sorts of

economic policies that would become the norm during his time as US president. As
one Arkansas newspaper put it, Clinton's agenda “would wed some state agencies,
their activities, funds and fund sources to efforts of the private sector.” It included
the creation of a science and technology hub to “seed the birth of new firms,
industries and innovations in Arkansas,” and a capital fund that would “aggressively
lend higher risk capital to ... member banks”?

The centerpiece of Clinton's plan, however, was the transformation of Arkansas
Housing Development Authority, established in the 1970s, into the Arkansas
Development Finance Authority (ADFA). The transition was more than a cosmetic
change — the mandate for the new agency was to “do in the field of business
development what it does in the field of housing development.” A month later, in
January, Clinton outlined how the ADFA would work. It would “sell a wide range of
tax-exempt revenue bonds to generate revenue. The money would then be passed to
financial institutions for low-interest economic development loans.”

The fortunes of Jackson Stephens became intimately entangled with the
activities of the AFDA. Stephens Inc., for example, was frequently utilized by the
ADFA to underwrite the bonds it issued. Stephens’ Worthen Bank, meanwhile,
sometimes acted as the trustee for loans made by the ADFA.2® The bank itself
directly interlocked with the agency itself: the president of the Worthen branch in
the city of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, James Stobaugh, sat on the ADFA board. To make
matters even more incestuous, one of the recipients of a major ADFA loan, Arkansas
Freightways, was a freighter company in which Stephens Inc. held the controlling
stake.22 Rose Law, of course, was Arkansas Freightways’ legal representative of
choice.

The ADFA seems to have had a particularly close relationship with Beverly
Enterprises, a subsidiary of Stephens Inc. that managed a national nursing home
chain. Bobby Stephens (no familial relation to Jackson Stephens), the vice president
of Beverly Enterprises, sat alongside Stobaugh on the board of the ADFA.
Unsurprisingly, Beverly Enterprises profited handsomely from ADFA bond
issuance, and retained the services of Rose Law. Several Rose Law associates,
including Webster Hubbell, owned stock in Beverly.+® Beverly would later pop up
in the Inslaw Affair — discussed in the next chapter — due to allegations that it was
using the infamous, compromised version of the PROMIS software.

Besides Stephens Inc., the ADFA was a great economic boon for Clinton's friend
Dan Lasater and his bond business, Lasater & Company. Larry Nichols, the ADFA‘s
marketing director who had been dismissed by the governor, charged that the

agency had been “set up by Clinton for Dan Lasater”1% The reason for Nichols’
dismissal is intriguing: the press had learned that he had been using ADFA phones
to make long-distant calls to Contra leaders, which he insisted had been authorized
by ADFA head Wooten Epes. While there might have been a bit of hyperbole and
vindictiveness to Nichols’ allegation, it is true that Lasater & Co. acted as an
underwriter for bonds issued by the agency.*2* There seems to have been a high
degree of competition between Stephens Inc. and Lasater & Co. when it came to
these underwriting contracts, but there was at least one direct link between the two
companies. Michael Drake, formerly of Stephens Inc, was the vice president of
Lasater & Co.

The ADFAs first industrial development loan was granted to a strange company
in Russellville, Arkansas called Park-On-Meter, Inc, or POM for short. It was
another clear-cut example of Arkansas nepotism: the law firm that handled the legal
work on the loan was Rose Law, while POM’s founder and president was Seth Ward
II - the brother-in-law of Webster Hubbell. Alexander Cockburn, who penned a
series of articles on POM, noted that “Worthen Bank ... appeared among the
institutions that from time to time had liens on POM”

In Compromised, Terry Reed and John Cummings wrote that the initial ADFA
loan to POM was intended for the expansion of their industrial capacities in
connection with a subcontract the company had gained from Iver Johnson's Arms, a
New Jersey-based firearms manufacturer In addition to parking meters, POM
was dipping into the armament business: on behalf of Iver Johnson's, Reed and
Cummings claimed, POM was constructing bolts and carrier assemblies for M16
rifles. Iver Johnson's, in turn, had been tapped by the CIA for covert weapons
production, and the M16s were ultimately destined for the Contras in Nicaragua.

Howard Schneider, a journalist for the Washington Post, found that the “Iver
Johnsons company near Little Rock, which the book [Compromised] portrays as
being the center of the gun-manufacturing effort, did ship a load of weapons to
Nicaragua through a Mexican distributor” — precisely the arrangement that Reed
and Cummings described.1° POM itself was found to have had a contract to make
gun parts on behalf of Iver Johnson's, though Seth Ward Jr. told the Post that it had
been firing pins, not bolts. Iver Johnson's, for its part, identified the arms as M1
rifles, not M16s.

Gary Webb observed a stark similarity between the gun manufacturing
operation in Arkansas and a similar operation that had taken shape on the Cabazon

Indian Reservation in Riverside County, California. What had started off as a

takeover of the tribe as part of a plan to develop a gambling hub by John Philip
Nichols, a mobster with reputed CIA ties, had transformed into an intricate joint
venture with the Wackenhut Corporation and a handful of other firms (at least one
of which was a direct CIA cut-out company) to develop weapons systems.“ Some
of these, such as a line of light-weight machine gun pistols, were intended to be
provided to the Contras.

These activities at Cabazon were at the center of journalist Danny Casolaro’s
investigation into the network that he dubbed “the Octopus” and Cabazon played a
key role in the Inslaw affair or PROMIS scandal - the subject of the next chapter.

Contra leader Eden Pastora - who later ran afoul of the Enterprise and was the
target of an assassination attempt in May 1984 — attended at least one weapons
demonstration at Cabazon. The list of those present for this demonstration included
John Vanderwerker, a CIA research and development specialist, G. Wayne Reeder, a
crooked developer close to Nichols (Reeder, incidentally, was a major S&L
borrower with close connections to Herman Beebe), and Earl Brian, a close friend

of Ronald Reagan and the controlling interest behind several tech firms.128

Brian,
who was purported to have arrived at the demonstration with Reeder, would
emerge as a central player in the Inslaw Affair.

Michael Riconosciuto, a chief witness in that case, was also present at the
demonstration, and would subsequently charge that the alterations made to Inslaw’s
PROMIS software were made at Cabazon.

Riconosciuto further attested to personal knowledge of Contra-oriented
weapons development taking place at POM in Arkansas. He told Alexander
Cockburn that POM had entered into an arrangement with Wackenhut and
Stormont Labs, a California-based genetics research and pharmaceutical company,
“to develop chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed in chemical
guerrilla warfare.”10?

An Army “chemical unit” was purported to have supplied POM with “chemical
agents, while the parking meter manufacturer, as part of its end of the arrangement,
prototyped explosive devices such as grenades and bombs that would disperse the
chemicals.

Internal documentation from Cabazon Arms, the joint venture between
Wackenhut and the Cabazon tribe, does allude to Stormont Labs in the context of
“agents and production techniques related to biological war? The document in
question, obtained by Casolaro and today logged in an archived collection of his
surviving papers, was a letter from Nichols to a Harry Fair at Tactical Technology in

Arlington, Virginia. That would be the Tactical Technology Office of the Pentagon's
DARPA, which Fair was connected to in the mid-1980s.2

Mentioned elsewhere in the papers of the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture
was a company called the First Intercontinental Development Corporation
(FIDCO), described by author Cheri Seymour as a purported National Security
Council front company. Directors of FIDCO included Michael McManus, an
attorney who served as an assistant to Reagan's chief of staff, George K. Pender and
Kenneth Roe of Burns & Roe, and Clinton Murchison Jr.H2 As mentioned earlier,
Murchison Jr. himself was in and out of Arkansas, borrowing heavily from the Rose
Law-linked FirstSouth savings and loan.

When questioned about Riconosciuto’s claims, Ward Jr. told a journalist from
The Nation that POM wasn’t in the chemical warfare business. The company was
instead busy making “re-entry cones for the nuclear warheads on MX missiles and
nozzles for rocket engines” H3 Intriguingly, the US Army’s 354" Chemical
Company, since April 1981, had been located in Russellville, Arkansas. This unit
maintained property directly adjacent to POM’s industrial complex.

Riconosciuto told Alexander Cockburn and Bryce Hoffman, a journalist for The
Nation, that since 1981, POM had been in the business of making drop tanks -
auxiliary fuel tanks attached to the exteriors of aircraft — for C-130s. However,
Cockburn and Hoffman were not able to confirm via the FAA, which regulates tank
manufacturing, that POM was an authorized producer. Cockburn writes that when
Hoffman contacted the FAA, “the official with whom he spoke apparently
misunderstood his question on drop tank regulations and assumed he was a
prospective manufacturer. ‘Oh! So you must have one of those Southern Air

Transport contracts” H5

OFFSHORED

O of the weirder intersections in the ADFA complex was between the

development agency and the Coral Reinsurance Company, which had been
set up in the offshore haven of Barbados. Reinsurance is basically insurance for
insurance companies: it allows company A (in this case, the primary insurance firm)
to offload portions of its risk onto company B (the reinsurance company). The
reasons for this are multifold. It offers a buffer or protection for the insurance
company from risks, while also - and perhaps more importantly - allowing
insurance companies to engage in expanded business practices that might otherwise

have been blocked by government regulations requiring particular asset to risk
ratios. Often, insurance companies will set up their own reinsurance companies for
this exact purpose. In order to hide the ownership structure, offshore havens are
selected to create these companies.

This is exactly how Coral functioned. It took debt and other risks off the books
of its parent, though this parent was hidden through proxies. On the other side of
this firewall, in actual control of Coral, was American International Group (AIG),
the international insurance and finance monolith that, during the 2008 financial
crisis, was bailed out by the US government to the tune of $180 billion dollars. In
the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published in 2011, AIG was identified as having
a lengthy history of engaging in overly risky ventures, frequently carried out with
little to no hedging or protection. AIG’s creation of Coral is just one example of
this.

In order to hide its connection to Coral, AIG had called upon the resources of
Goldman Sachs, which in turn did the actual legwork in setting up the reinsurance
company. Overseeing this operation was the head of Goldman's stock and bonding
trading department, Robert Rubin.” Rubin would subsequently serve as co-
chairman of Goldman, starting in 1990, before transitioning to a storied career in
public service. At the beginning of 1993, Bill Clinton — now president — appointed
him as the director of his National Economic Council. A year later, Rubin was sworn
in as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. He served in that position until 1999 and, upon
leaving the government, he went to work at Citigroup. As will be noted in chapter
16, Rubin was the person who signed off on Jeffrey Epstein’s first visit to the Clinton
White House in early 1993.

Goldman Sachs organized Coral in a such way that AIG would not appear as a
stockholder. Instead, stocks would be spread around to a small and select group who
had been handpicked by Goldman. One of these was Samuel Zell, a shady property-
flipper from Chicago who had ties to the Gouletas family, whose significant ties to
Epstein are detailed in chapter 12, as well as to Burton Kanter. In 1976, Zell and
Kanter, along with a handful of other associates, were indicted for hiding money
gained from real estate deals in Helliwell and Kanter’s Castle Bank.+8

The ADFA, however, was the largest holder of stock in Coral Reinsurance. H? It
fueled its purchase in Goldman’s private offering with a hefty, multi-million dollar
loan from the Chicago branch of Japan’s Sanwa Bank, which had a history of money
laundering allegations. For instance, Sanwas Los Angeles branch had been a

depository for money pilfered by the Marcos family of the Philippines.2°

Interestingly, Terry Reed and John Cummings write in Compromised that the ADFA
loan to Park-on-Meter was purchased by Fuji Bank of Japan.* Fuji Bank has a
history of involvement with Sanwa Bank, and the two banks have undertaken
several different merger projects since the 1970s.

What brought the ADFA to the attention of Goldman Sachs and AIG? It is
strange that a fairly obscure state government development agency, albeit one
teeming with ties to intelligence networks and criminal enterprises, would be
selected by these major Wall Street businesses to effectively underwrite AIG's
reinsurance apparatus. The answer is that the deal was arranged through the ADFA’s
powerful insider, Jackson Stephens. It turns out that Stephens boasted all sorts of
business connections with AIG. For example, an offshore company called Beverly
Indemnity was doing some work underwriting policies issued by AIG. Beverly
Indemnity was itself something of a hidden subsidiary of Beverly Enterprises, and
was run by Beverly’s general counsel, Robert Pommerville.12

The nursing homes managed by Beverly Enterprises were insured by National
Union Fire and Home Insurance of Pittsburgh, an insurance company 100% owned
by AIG.“3 National Union Fire and Home had its own connections to the world of
offshore insurance hijinks. According to financial journalist Lucy Komisar, the AIG
subsidiary was providing insurance to Victor Posner's NVF Corp. via an offshore
company called Chesapeake Insurance.” Posner’s NVF, as mentioned in chapter 6,
had been one of the firms represented by William Casey in the years just prior to his
time as Reagan's CIA director. Importantly, Reagan offered the position of deputy
director of the CIA to Maurice Greenberg, then the head of AIG. Greenberg, who
had maintained longstanding ties to the agency, declined the offer.2=

Greenberg’s ties to the CIA are nested within a wider history of involvement of
AIG with the world of intelligence. These ties stretched back to the earlier years of
the company, when it was known as American International Underwriters, and was
overseen by the company’s founder, Cornelius Vander Starr. Starr had set up a string
of insurance companies across the Asia and the Pacific region, which became key
nodes in the wartime intelligence apparatus. Starr himself went to work for the OSS,
which brought him into contact with other “China hands” like Paul Helliwell. These
insurance companies were deployed as cover for OSS agents, many of whom had
started off as Starrs employees.1“° In addition, AIG’s longtime general counsel,
Duncan Lee, had served in the OSS as the special assistant to William Donovan.
After the war, he went to work as counsel for the CIA's Civil Air Transport.

Incredibly, Lee was eventually outed as having acted as a mole for Soviet intelligence
within the OSS."*7

The connection between Starr and Helliwell was of particular importance. In
1963, Helliwell and Inge Gordon Mosvold - a frontman for Daniel K. Ludwig, the
mysterious billionaire shipping magnate - set up the Bank of the Caribbean
Limited. It was something of a paper bank, established and then left on the shelf.
During the mid-1960s, it was picked up by American International Underwriters
and rechristened as Underwriters Bank Limited. The directors of the bank were all
individuals connected to Helliwell and Kanter’s Castle Bank, signaling that the
insurance complex that would become AIG was woven into the same hot money
networks utilized by the CIA and organized crime.28

That Sam Zell, with his own dealings with Kanter and Castle Bank, would end
up alongside the ADFA as a stockholder in AIG’s Coral Reinsurance suggests that
these networks are in fact linked directly together. Also instructive is the fact that
Paul Helliwell himself seems to have been involved in the very first offshore
reinsurance companies, which he set up on behalf of George Eccles (who sat on the
board of the Moody-controlled American National Insurance Company, or
ANICO).”? AIG, meanwhile, took credit itself for developing the practice of
offshoring reinsurance companies.1“2 Given the intertwined history of Helliwell and
AIG, it is possible that both stand together at the genesis of these deceptive financial
tactics.

BCCI RETURNS

T: Stephens liked to spread around his money and political influence. He was
not content trafficking just with the Clintons and Arkansas interests, even if they
were being propelled at a rapid pace toward the White House. He was also intent on
cozying up to their counterparts in the Republican Party — the Bush family. In the
late 1980s, Stephens was a member of the Bush-led “Team 100” project, which was a
coterie of deep-pocketed GOP donors who had contributed at least $100,000 to the
party (a Washington Post article on the Team 100 noted that donors included “major
Drexel Burnham Lambert clients Frank Lorenzo, Ronald Perelman, T. Boone
Pickens, and Saul Steinberg”).°4 During this same time period, Stephens’ wife
Mary Anne served as the co-chair of the Bush for President campaign's Arkansas

wing. +2

Few cases, however, are as telling as the encounter between Jackson Stephens
and Harken Energy, a small oil company oddly full of influential principals — the
best known among them being George W. Bush, who was both a stakeholder and
director. The story of Stephens and Harkens brings, among other things, BCCI back
into the picture, and also sets the stage for the deepening relationship between
BCCI-linked individuals and the banking networks down in Arkansas.

Harken was created in July 1973. The company was incorporated in California
by two Wall Street traders, Phil Kendrick Jr. and Henry L. Mulligan.“ Their early
target was Australia, which was viewed at the time as a place with untapped drilling
potential. They soon entered into a consortium alongside Esso and Exxon and,
before long, Harken had a dozen wells producing a modest amount of crude. In
1983, Kendrick and Mulligan unloaded Harken to a syndicate led by a pair of New
York attorneys, Alan and Wayne Quasha. A sizable share of Harken stock was
purchased by an offshore company called North American Resources (NAR). NAR
was a joint venture of the Quashas and the Richemont Group.

Richemont is based in Switzerland, but first began in South Africa under the
leadership of its founder, Antony Rupert. Richemont had been formed on the basis
of Rupert’s predecessor company, set up in 1947, called the Rembrandt Group.
Rembrandt had been closely tied to European financial interests. For example,
Edmund L. Rothschild, then chairman of N.M. Rothschild, had served on the board
of Rembrandt. Even the initial fortune that Rupert used to set up Rembrandt can
ultimately be traced back to European origins. In 1943, he had become the head of
the South African subsidiary of the Distillers Company, the Scottish alcohol and
pharmaceutical giant that, as noted in chapter 2, was intimately connected to the
Bronfmans.

The Quashas, meanwhile, are perhaps even more interesting than their South
African business partner. Alan and Wayne Quasha worked at the law firm founded
by their father, William Quasha, who — throughout the 1970s and 1980s — operated
from his base in the Philippines. Jonathan Kwitny, in his classic work, Crimes of the
Patriots, linked Quasha directly to Nugan Hand, the Australian bank that was
utilized by Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, and others in their network. General
LeRoy Manor, a counter-insurgency specialist, had become the chief of staff for the
US Military Pacific Command before retiring and taking a position running the
Nugan Hand office in the Philippines. He tapped Quasha to serve as the office's

attorney. 4

Nugan Hand's Philippines office was closely tied to the country’s corrupt leader,
Ferdinand Marcos. General Manor had known Marcos since his days in the US
Pacific Command, when the two negotiated over the land rights for American
military bases in the Philippines. Kwitny adds that “Marcos’ brother-in-law, Ludwig
Rocka, actually shared the Nugan Hand office suite, and Rocka’s International
Development & Planning Corporation took over the suite after Nugan Hand's
collapse”! 3$ Rocka himself moved money through the bank, while Ferdinand
Marcos and his wife, Imelda, were rumored to do the same. Quasha himself appears
to have had ties to the Marcos family. When Marcos was facing stiff political
opposition in 1986, he penned a controversial statement in support of the leader.“°

It was subsequently revealed that the Marcos family hid away massive amounts
of money and gold, pilfered from the Filipino citizenry, the public coffers, and the
country’s gold mines, in secret Swiss bank accounts — namely, those at the Union
Bank of Switzerland.4*4 According to Kwitny, Union Bank of Switzerland also
appeared in the course of the Nugan Hand affair: “Bernie Houghton [one of the
bank’s founders] was well acquainted with a traveling official of the Union Bank, and
had brought him around to Nugan Hand representatives in Asia to make
introductions” +38

David Armstrong, who penned an expose of Harken in Z Magazine in 1991,
noted that Union Bank of Switzerland maintained connections to other figures
involved with the oil company. Harken was closely connected to a Denver,
Colorado-based company called Frontier Oil & Refining Co. —- where Alan Quasha
served as chairman of the board - which was taken over in the late 1980s by the
Richemont Group’s Antony Rupert. Armstrong writes that “When Rupert acquired
Frontier in a leveraged buyout in 1988, he announced an $85 million ‘revolving
credit facility’ with Union Bank of Switzerland, replacing all of refiner’s previous
‘working capital facilities?” +32

Union Bank of Switzerland also had a history with one of Harken’s more
surprising investors: the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros. Shortly after
the Quasha-Rupert takeover of Harken in 1983, Soros became the next biggest
shareholder in the company after them. In 1984, an arrangement was made where
Harken would act as the “exclusive agent and manager of Soros Oil Inc.”42

Two years later, Harken would gain two additional — and equally surprising —
shareholders. For one, there was the Harvard Management Company, the body set
up under the auspices of the Harvard Corporation to manage the elite university's
investments. Less than a decade later, Harvard and Soros would be found alongside

each other again in arranging the privatization and looting of Russia state-owned
industries shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As Russ Baker has shown, the longtime head of the Harvard Corporation,
Robert G. Stone, was intimately familiar with the elite circles where business and
intelligence mixed. Intriguingly, the president of the Harvard Management
Corporation, Michael Eisenson, stated that “There were not too many degrees of
separation between Stone and the Quashas.” +4!

There were also not too many degrees of separation between Stone and the
Quasha’s partner, Antony Rupert. Stone’s father-in-law was Godfrey A. Rockefeller,
a cousin of the better-known David, Nelson and Laurance brothers and a college
friend of George H.W. Bush. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Godfrey played a
central role in organizing the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); according to a
memorial published by the fund after his death in 2010, he had even hired their “first
staff and chief scientist”! This would have certainly brought Godfrey into direct
contact with Rupert, as the Southern African businessman had been personally
recruited into the organization by Prince Bernard of the Netherlands in 1968.14

Also joining Harken in 1986 alongside Harvard was the son of Godfrey’s friend
— George W. Bush. It was also the year that Harken bought up Spectrum7, a
beleaguered oil company that had been formed from a merger between Bush
Exploration — set up originally as Arbusto Energy by George W. Bush in 1977, with
investment capital provided in part by CIA asset Jim Bath as well as the oil concerns
of Ohio businessmen William DeWitt Jr. and Mercer Reynolds III.“ Spectrum was
reportedly barely even an oil producer, “less concerned with recovering oil than in
creating tax shelters. The company specialized in selling limited partnerships, which
generated generous write-offs before the tax laws were revised in 19867145

Russ Baker writes that within several years of the deal between Bush Energy and
Spectrum, DeWitt and Reynolds were “on the ground floor” of an insurance and
reinsurance company called Midwest Employers Casualty Company (MECC).
Stephens Inc. — which, as noted above, was actively connected to the world of
reinsurance — was one of the big stockholders in MECC.

When Spectrum was purchased by Harken, Bush, formerly Spectrum's CEO,
joined Harken’s board of directors. He also received a sizable chunk of Harken stock,
and a high-dollar consultancy fee that he continued to receive after he went to work
on his father’s presidential campaign in the late 1980s. In December 1988, Bush
took a low-interest loan out from Harken, which he used to purchase more of the
company’s stock. As the 1980s drew to a close, Harken had drawn itself even deeper

into the orbit of Bush-connected interests. It organized a commodities trading
subsidiary, which formed a close working relationship with Enron**“ Enron’s
president, Kenneth Lay, had been a big supporter of George H.W. Bush since the
1980 election, and the company would later become one of George W. Bush's
greatest political benefactors.148

However, it was in 1987, before Bush re-upped his Harken stock, that the
company crossed paths with Clinton’s and Bush's backer, Jackson Stephens. After
the Spectrum7 buy-out, Harken had a debt problem, and was in need of further
financing in order to resolve its core issues. They turned to Stephens Inc., which
quickly went to work and brought in the Union Bank of Switzerland“? Union Bank
bought up Harken stock via Stephens, but soon the bank ran into a “regulatory
snag.” The stock was then moved to another client of Stephens Inc., Sheikh Abdullah
Taha Bakhsh, who was a close business associate of two BCCI insiders: Khalid bin
Mahfouz and Ghaith Pharaon. Union Bank of Switzerland, for its part, had its own
BCCI ties. Together with the criminal bank it owned a Swiss bank called Banque de
Commerce et de Placements (BCP). Representing BCCI interests at BCP was the
ubiquitous Alfred Hartmann.®2

Despite these efforts, by 1989, Harken was in trouble yet again. The commodity
trading subsidiary proved disastrous, costing Harken some $17 million in losses by
the end of that year. Soros exited at the same time, and along the way managed to
convince Harken to sell their stake in the lucrative Crystal Oil Company of
Louisiana to his Quantum Fund N.V. Harken’s future was now uncertain, as the
company faced a cash shortage. Yet, suddenly, in January 1990, it landed an
inexplicable oil deal with the mineral-rich country of Bahrain. David Armstrong
wrote that the deal gave “Harken the exclusive exploration, development,
production, transportation and marketing rights to most of Bahrain's offshore oil
and gas reserves. The territories covered by the pact lie sandwiched between the
world’s largest oil field, off the shore of Saudi Arabia, and one of the biggest natural
gas fields, off the shore of Qatar” +

The cast behind Harken’s landing of this deal, which came at such a crucial time
for the company, is full of the usual suspects. There was David Edwards, who acted
as a go-between for Harken and Bahrain. He had previously worked for Stephens
Inc. and had been involved in the Harken-Union Bank of Switzerland negotiations.
There was Bahrain’s prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa bin-Salman al-Khalifa, whose
brother was a BCCI stockholder in 1990.42 And there was also the US ambassador
to Bahrain, Charles Hostler. He was reportedly close to BCCI frontman

Mohammed Hammoud, who, as discussed previously, was tied up in various
business and political ventures with Senator Orrin Hatch and Adnan Khashoggi.
And what about Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the man who ended up with Union Bank of
Switzerland’s Harken shares? In October 1990, the New York Times reported that he
had “acquired a 9.6 percent stake in the Worthen Banking Corporation, a bank

holding company based in Little Rock, Arkansas.”®3

Endnotes

10
11

Armstrong, Scott, Malcolm Byrne, Thomas S. Blanton, Laurence Chang, Glenn Baker, and
National Security Archive, The Chronology: The Documented Day-to-Day Account of the Secret
Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (NY: Warner, 1987), 516,
https://archive.org/details/chronologydocumeO0arms.

Paul Houston and Michael Wines, “Papers from North Safe Trace Cash; Diagrams Suggest a
Network of Groups to Aid the Contras,” Orlando Sentinel, February 28, 1987,
https://www.orlan-dosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1987-03-01-0110250206-story.html.
John Cummings and Ernest Volkman, “Snowbound,’ Penthouse, July, 1989.

Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy: A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on
Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Committee on Foreign Relations,
December 1988, 121, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000014976124.

Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “Legacy of a Slain Drug Informer,” Washington Post,
February 28, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1989/02/28/legacy-of-a-
slain-drug-informer/41b5c1bf-ba53-48f4-87d8-afd6bcbc1 5ce/.

Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy: A Report, Volume 4, 285.

Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob, and America’s Secret History (Madcow
Press, 2006), 270.

Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 270.

Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 271.

“Lavoie Appointed Halwin Treasurer,’ Arizona Republic, September 12, 1971.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its
Hold on America, 1947-2000, 1st ed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 233,
https://archive.org/details/moneypowermakingOOdent.

“Lavoie Appointed Halwin Treasurer”; Don G. Campbell, “Just Like Big Boys: Trust Lets Little
Guy Put His Funds to Work in Tough Real Estate Field,’ Arizona Republic, June 27, 1971.

Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York:
Pocket Star Books, 1994), 266, https://archive.org/details/officialconfideO00summ.

Summers, Official and Confidential, 266.

Denton and Morris, The Money and the Power, 233.

Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 274.

Arthur Johnson, Breaking the Banks (Lester & O. Dennys Publisher, 1987), 187.

James Fleming, “Probing the Cayman Islands Connection,” Maclean's, August 29, 1983,

Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 425.

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central
America (University of California Press, 1998), 101-102.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 101.
Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 263.
Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys, 371.

24

25

26
27
28
29

30

31

32

33
34
35
36

37

38

39

40

Gary Hines, “Defense to Present Case in Seal Murder Trial,” UPI, May 12, 1987,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/05/12/Defense-to-present-case-in-Seal-murder-
trial/8621547790400/.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 14; Coutin and his ties are discussed at length in
“Declaration of Plaintiff's Counsel, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull, Rene
Corbo,”

hn-HullReneCorboEtAI.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, “The Crimes of Mena,” Penthouse, July, 1995.

Jo Chandler and Jan Roberts, “The Shadowy Fate of an RAAF Hercules,” The Age, July 1, 1991.
Chandler and Roberts, “The Shadowy Fate.”

Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “Angola Plane Crash Tangled in Mystery,’ Washington Post,
December 30, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1991/12/30/angola-
plane-crash-tangled-in-mystery/2d51ee0c-db96-4b4a-bc96-63acc560803¢/.

For a lengthy discussion about Reinhardt, St. Lucia, and the CIA, see Don Rogers, Hotel
Hercules: Flying CIA and UN Missions from Jamba to Phnom Penh (Transarms Editions,

“Roger Morris Interview,’ PBS Frontline, June 13, 1996,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice/bill/morris1.html.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and their America (Regnery
Publishing, 1999), 40.

Denton and Morris, Partners in Power, 40.

Denton and Morris, Partners in Power, 80-82.

Denton and Morris, Partners in Power, 104.

L. D. Brown, Crossfire: Witness in the Clinton Investigation, 1st ed (San Diego, Calif: Black Forest
Press, 1999), 101.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London:
Verso, 1998), 328, https://archive.org/details/whiteoutciadrugsO0Ocock,

Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA (S.P.1. Books,
February 1, 1994), 58.

“Investigation of the Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters,’ US Senate
Special Committee to Investigate the Whitewater Development Corporation and Related
Matters (1997), 111.

Jimmy Chagra utilized as his bodyguards members of “The Company,’ an entity described in
FBI files as a network of former US special forces soldiers, police officers, and US Cus-toms
officials involved in drug smuggling and other illicit activities. The Company was set up and
operated by Bradley Bryant and Andrew Thornton II, with a base of operations in rural
Kentucky (Thornton was a former Lexington, Kentucky narcotics detective). Sally Denton’s
reporting on The Company illustrates that their connections went very high in the world of
Kentucky politics, even extending to the office of governor John Y. Brown. If this all sounds
very reminiscent of what was taking place in Arkansas at the exact same time, it probably
wasn't coincidence. Brown was close to both Clinton and Lasater (Lasater stated that he had
been first introduced to cocaine by Jimmy Lambert, a business partner of Brown who was
close to The Company). Bill and Hillary Clinton and Lasater traveled together on Lasater’s
private plane to the 1983 Kentucky Derby, and while there Lasater passed “a paper bag

41
42
43
44

45

46

47

48

49
50

51

52

53

54

55

56
57

58
59

containing $300,000 in cash” to Brown via Lambert. In a strange line leading back to the

world of Ted Shackley’s “private CIA” network, Denton writes in her book that the ATF

strongly suspected that The Company was tied to Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil’s activities.
On The Company, see Sally Denton, The Bluegrass Conspiracy (Avon, 1990). On Lasater’s

money pass, see Denton and Morris, Partners in Power, 419-20.

Denton and Morris, Partners in Power, 421.

“Declaration of Plaintiff's Counsel,” 297.

“Declaration of Plaintiff's Counsel,’ 297-98.

Michael Ross, “Probe Links ‘Reagan Doctrine’ to Covert Aid to Laos Rebels,” January 23, 1993,

Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-01-23-mn-1607-

story.html.

Ross, “Probe Links.”

See Paul Hillmer, A People’s History of the Hmong (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015).

For a good overview on Gene Wheaton, see “Bill Kelly’s 2021 CAPA Conference Presentation

on Gene Wheaton and Carl Jenkins,’ JFKcountercoup, December 20, 2021 https://jfkcounter-

Micah Morrison, “The Mena Coverup,’ Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1999,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB92042 1328276427000.

Reed and Cummings, Compromised, 277.

“United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Questionnaire for Non-Judicial

Nominees,”

naire%20(PUBLIC).pdf

Josh Tyrangiel, “O Brother, Where Art Thy Standards?,’ TIME, July 9, 2001,

Anne Hagedorn Auerbach, Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America’s
Premier Racing Dynasty (Holt Papersbacks, 1995), 175.

Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (S.P.I. Books, 1992), 143. Though their time in
the fraternity was separated by a few decades, Hunt and Aubin were both members of
Kappa Sigma. Brewton shows that many of the S&L looters in Texas were connected to this
fraternity.

Brewton, The Mafia, 150-151. John Riddle was another member of the Kappa Sigma
fraternity. He engaged in many business arrangements with Robert Corson, the suspected
CIA asset who had ties to the Supermarket.

“Complaint for Freedom of Information, filed by R. David Lewis on August 4, 2016, as part of
Linda Ives V. United States of America,’ US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas
“Complaint for Freedom of Information,’ 17.

Jane Hunter, “Cocaine and Cutouts: Israel’s Unseen Diplomacy,’ The Link, Vol. 22, No. 1,
January-March 1989, https://ameu.org/getattachment/7ab-1cd1b-ba2c-41da-8d09-
8483bce764dc/Cocaine,-Cutouts-Israel-s-Unseen-Diplomacy.aspx.

Brewton, The Mafia, 106-107.

Jeff Gerth, “European Tied to Illegal Acts is Shielded by C.I.A.” New York Times, February 8,

60
61

62
63

64
65

66

67
68

69

70
71

72

73
74
75
76

77

78
79

80
81
82
83

by-cia.html.
Brewton, The Mafia, 80-81.
Ned Daly, “Ravaging the Redwood: Charles Hurwitz, Michael Milken and the Costs of Greed,’

Brewton, The Mafia, 80.

The Comptroller Report on Herman K. Beebe is reprinted in full in Stephen Pizzo, Mary
Fricker, and Paulo Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans (Harper
Perennial, 1991), 497-511.

Daly, “Ravaging the Redwood.’

Hobart Rowen, “Man Seeking Lance Stock No Newcomer to World of Finance,’ Washington
Post, September 1, 1977,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/09/01/man-seeking-lance-stock-
no-newcomer-to-world-of-finance/048e8147-3eac-4a54-8b20-c0d7d3df0e9b/.

Peter Waldman, “Lippo’s Arkansas Ties Win Benefits if Not Many Contracts,’ Wall Street
Journal, October 16, 1996, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB84541484812670000.
Mochtar Riady, Mochtar Riady: My Life. (Wiley, 2016), 101.

See, for example, “Casey Cleared in Foreign Agent Case,” UPI April 9, 1982,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/04/09/Casey-cleared-in-foreign-agent-
case/8185387176400/.

Alan A. Block, All is Clouded By Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International
Organized Crime. (Praeger, 2004), 28-32.

This is discussed at length in Block, All is Clouded By Desire, 16-32.

Donald White, “What Makes Stocks Go Up?,” San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 1964; “In
Bahamas, Banking is Second Only to Tourism,’ New York Times, March 3, 1977.

David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in
the Congo Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 182-184.

Arthur Levy, Diamonds and Conflict: Problems and Solutions (Novinka Books, 2003), 67.
Block, All is Clouded by Desire, 85.
Brewton, The Mafia, 366.

Investigation of Lincoln Saving and Loan, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Finance,
and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session,
1990, 212-15,

AAAIAAJ.

James Granelli, “French Bank off the Hook in Keating Suit,’ Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1992,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-06-17-fi-599-story.html.

Investigation of Lincoln Saving and Loan, 46.

William H. Meyers, “Megadealer for the Rothschilds,” New York Times, December 4, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/magazine/meagdealer-for-the-rothschilds.html.

Investigation of Lincoln Saving and Loan, 456; Block All is Clouded By Desire, 111.

L.J. Davis, “The Name of the Rose: An Arkansas Thriller,’ New Republic, April 4, 1994.
Terry Carter, “From Bum’s Rush to Bum Rap,’ ABA Journal, July, 1998.

Davis, “The Name of the Rose.’

84 Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, Inside Job, 468-69.

85 Davis, “The Name of the Rose.”

86 Davis, “The Name of the Rose.”

87 “Banking Is Different in Arkansas,’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1984; Mochtar
Riady, My Life, 170.

88 Patrick Huen, Jean Jinghan Chen, Ming-Hau Liu, Seng Heng Bank: History and Acquisition by
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 25.

89 Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (Palgrave Macmillian, 2003),
102.

90 Lintner, Blood Brothers, 101.

91 “FABCO announces Stephens group transactions,’ The Times (Shreveport), October 22, 1983;
“Fabco Announces 473,000-share sale,’ Baxter Bulletin, Februay 17, 1984.

92 “FABCO Readies Stock Purchase,’ The Commercial Appeal, October 30, 1983.

93 Davis, “In the Name of the Rose.”

94 “Gov. Clinton Outlines Job Development Plan,” Baxter Bulletin, December 12, 1984.

95 “Gov. Clinton Outlines Job Development Plan.”

96 “Clinton Wants to Spend State’s Surplus Millions,” The Commercial Appeal, January 6, 1985.

97 Davis, “In the Name of the Rose.”

98 Alexander Cockburn, “Air Cocaine: the Wild, True Story of Drug Running, Arms Smuggling,
and Contras at the Backwoods Airstrip in Clinton's Arkansas,’ Counterpunch, November 4,
2016.

99 Michael J. Goodman and John M. Broder, “Arkansas Lending Agency Benefited Clinton
Donors,’ Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1992.

100 See Alexander Cockburn, “Hillary Clinton’s Great Nursing Home Rip-Off,’ Counterpunch,
February 19, 2016; Goodman, Broder, “Arkansas Lending Agency Benefited Clinton Donors.”
Beverly also directly interlocked with Worthen, the bank's chairman, Curtis Bradford, for a
director at Beverly.

101 Davis, “In the Name of the Rose.”

102 Lasater’s connections to the ADFA are discussed at length in the Investigation of the
Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters report.

103 Cockburn, “Air Cocaine.”

104 Reed and Cummings, Compromised, 169-172.

105 Howard Schneider, “Clandestination: Arkansas,’ Washington Post, July 21, 1994,

arkansas/e2c39f46-602b-4f4c-91fd-1ce94c743d69/.

106 Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories
Press, 1998), 114-115.

107 This is discussed at length in works such as Cheri Seymour, The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s
Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal, ePub (Trine Day, 2010).

108 G.Wayne Reeder appears to have been involved in several ventures involving Herman
Beebe. According to Beebe’s right-hand man Dale Anderson, the two probably met at the La
Costa resort, which was also likely the point of contact between Beebe and Khashoggi’s
friend Mario Renda. Reeder also got $14 million from Silverado Savings and Loan, where

109
110

111
112

113
114

115

Neil Bush, son of George H.W. Bush, sat on the board. On Reeder and Beebe, see Pizzo,
Fricker and Muolo, Inside Job, 332. On Reeder and Silverado, see Brewton, The Mafia, 261.

Reeder was also reportedly close to C.H. and Jake Butcher, brothers from Knoxville
whose banking empire went bottom-up in the 1980s due to a blizzard of fraudulent loans
and overspending. According to one source, Reeder posted C.H’s bail money when the
Tennessee banker went down for fraud. See David Martin, “He’s No Angel,’ The Pitch,
September 14, 2004.

A 1987 interview with Michael Riconosciuto, founded in the papers of journalist Danny
Casolaro, also mentions the Reeder/Butcher link. A reference in the document is made to
“the Butchers and the Joe Duncan affair that involved the letter from Meese’s wife.’ This
refers to an incident where Edwin Meese’s wife wrote a letter declaring that she and her
husband supported Joseph Duncan, the son of Tennessee congressman John J. Duncan,
who had become mired in legal issues due to his association with the Butchers. The Duncan
family controlled a Knoxville, Tennessee thrift called Knox Federal Savings and Loan
Associate, and in 1981 had apparently conspired to transfer control of the lending
institution to the Butcher brothers. In exchange, C.H. Butcher arranged to have large,
outstanding debts Duncan owed to United American Bank of Knoxville—owned by Jake
Butcher—forgiven. See Philip Shenon, “Meese’s Wife Writes to Judge in Praise of Convicted
Friend,’ The New York Times, November 6, 1987; John E. Yang, U.S. Sues Congressman, 2 of
his Sons for Roles in Collapse of Tennessee Bank,’ Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1987).

The Butcher brothers are worthy of deeper scrutiny. They appear as major players in
James Ring Adam’s book The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal (Wiley, 1990). Adams writes that
Jake Butcher “was a close friend of President Jimmy Carter and Carter’s confidant, the
Georgia banker Bert Lance” (p. 87). Lance, on one occasion, was a guest of honor at a dinner
at Jake’s illustrious mansion, named “Whirlwind” (p. 88). According to one of insiders to
Butcher's banking world, another dinner guest at times was Bruce Rappaport (p. 192). Yet
another close associate of the Butchers that is named by Adams—and something that is
reflected in numerous newspaper society pages from the 1980s—was Kentucky governor
John Y. Brown. On John Y. Brown, drug smuggling, and the connection to Clinton and
Lasater, see endnote 40 above.

Cockburn, “Air Cocaine.’

An overview of Fair’s biography can be found at the website for the Institute for Strategic
and Innovative Technology: https://isitaustin.org/downloads/Fair_bio.html.

Seymour, The Last Circle, 74.

A US Trade and Development Program datasheet from August, 1982 lists a “Frank Pindar”
from Burns & Roe as a contractor on an electricity program for the country of Belize. Burns &
Roe is named as having been contracted by USAID. Also named on the project is Sergio
Brull, discussed in the last chapter in connection with the Supermarket. The datasheet can
be viewed at https://archive.org/details/201611171611,

Cockburn, “Air Cocaine.’

Department of the Army Lineage and Honors: 354th Chemical Company,

Alexander Cockburn, “The Secret Life of a Parking Meter Manufacturer,’ The Nation, March
16, 1992.

116

Tg

118
119

120

121
122
123
124
125

126

127

128

129

130
131

132

133

134

135

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the
Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,
January 2011, 352, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf.
“The Crimes of Mena: Gray Money,’ Arkansas Gazette, date unknown; Lucy Komisar,
“Cooking the Insurance Books,’ The Komisar Scoop, November 2004,
https://www.thekomisar-scoop.com/2004/11/cooking-the-insurance-books/.

Brewton, The Mafia CIA and George Bush, 245.

“The Crimes of Mena: Gray Money”; Lucy Komisar, “The Fall of a Titan,’ AlterNet, March 17,
2005, https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2005/03/the-fall-of-a-titan/; John Crudele, “AIG’s
Coral Insurance Woes Add Up,’ New York Post, March 31, 2005,

Bob Drogin and Henry Weinstein, “Marcos, Manila Reportedly Strike a Deal,” Los Angeles
Times, November 2, 1991, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-11-02-mn-689-
story.html.

Cummings and Reed, Compromised, 248.

“The Crimes of Mena: Gray Money.’

“The Crimes of Mena: Gray Money.’

Komisar, “The Fall of a Giant.’

R.T. Naylor, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation in the War on Terror (Mc-Gill-
Queen’s University Press), 2006.

Ron Shelp, The Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG
(Wiley, 2006), 93-95; Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central
Intelligence Agency (Lyons Press, 2005), 244.

On Lee and Civil Air Transport, see Smith, OSS, 253. On Lee as a Soviet spy, see John Haynes
and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 2000),
104-107.

This is discussed in Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal
Revenue Service in the Bahamas (Routledge, 1991) 182.

Insurance Industry: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee
on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, part 10, 1958,
p. 5927, https://books.google.com/books?id=mZ-rRADfew0C.

Komisar, “The Fall of a Giant.’

Charles R. Babcock, “George Bush’s Ruling Class,’ Washington Post, January 24, 1989,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/01/24/gop-discloses-names-of-
big-donors/5f97af2e-0d67-4adb-aee1-7f738367c4b3/.

Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two
Most Powerful Dynasties (Scribner, 2004), 120.

David Armstrong, “Global Entanglements: The Political Economy of a Texas Oil Co.,” Z
Magazine, November 1991. Accessed via
https://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2017/03/remembering-harken-money.html.

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of the Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (W.W.
Norton & Co, 1987), 36.

Kwitny, The Crimes of the Patriots, 37.

136 “U.S. Businessmen Distance Themselves from Pro-Marcos Statement,’ UPI, February 21, 1986,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/02/21/US-businessmen-distance-themselve-from-pro-
Marcos-statement/8923509346000/.

137 See Ellen Guerrero, “Official Claims Marcos Shipped Tons of Gold to Switzerland,’ AP News,
August 14, 1991, https://apnews.com/article/e2c5ce3f218206be6e9813db1754928a; Henry
Weinstein, “Swiss Accounts Frozen in Marcos Case,’ Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1997,

Family Mum on Swiss Bank Withdrawal,’ PhilStar Global, March 14, 2001,
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2001/03/14/90035/marcos-family-mum-swiss-bank-
withdrawal.

138 Kwitny, Crimes of the Patriots, 259.

139 Armstrong, “Global Entanglements.’

140 John Dunbar, “A Brief History of Bush, Harken, and the SEC,” Center for Public Integrity,
October 16, 2002, https://publicintegrity.org/environment/a-brief-history-of-bush-harken-
and-the-sec/.

141 Baker, Family of Secrets, 343.

142 World Wildlife Fund, “In Memorium: Godfrey A. Rockefeller,’
https://web.archive.org/web/20160404232506/ https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-
releases/in-memoriam-godfrey-a-rockefeller.

143 World Wildlife Fund, “Our History,’ https://www.wwf.org.za/our_people/our_history/.

144 Dunbar, “A Brief History.’

145 Dunbar, “A Brief History.’

146 Baker, Family of Secrets, 332.

147 Dunbar, “A Brief History.’

148 Enron: The Bush Connection (Democracy Now, 2006),
https://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/26/enron the bush connection.

149 Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World's Most Corrupt
Financial Empire (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 370.

150 Block, All is Clouded By Desire, 112.

151 Armstrong, “Global Entanglements.”

152 Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 370.

153 “Investor Acquires 9.6% of Worthen’, New York Times, October 13, 1990

worthen.html

CHAPTER9

HIGH TECH TREASON

THE MAKING OF A MAXWELL

B orn in what is now part of Ukraine, “Robert Maxwell” was the last in a series

of names used by Jan Ludvick Hoch, with his earlier aliases including the
names Abraham Hoch, Jan Ludvick, and Leslie Du Marier. The name Robert
Maxwell emerged at the behest of one of his superiors in the British military,
which Maxwell had joined during World War II. He left the village of his birth
prior to the war, when the Third Reich began its expansion, and made his way to
Britain. Maxwell's parents and his siblings are believed to have died in the
Holocaust.

Robert Maxwell was involved with the British intelligence service MI6 during
the war and, after the war, was befriended by Count Frederich vanden Huevel,
who had worked closely with Allen Dulles during the war.* Dulles went on to be
the first civilian director of the CIA and, during the war, was busy running
interference for prominent Nazis and actively undermining FDR's “unconditional
surrender” policy for senior Nazi leadership.

The chaos of post-war Europe allowed Maxwell to plant the seeds for what
would become his future media empire. Thanks to his contacts with Allied Forces
in post-war Berlin, he was able to acquire the publishing rights for prominent
European scientific journals and, in 1948, those interests were folded into the
British publishing company Butterworth, which had long-standing ties to British
intelligence.3 In the early 1950s, the company was renamed Pergamon Press, and
this company soon became the cornerstone of Maxwell’s media empire.

Pergamon’s access to prominent academics, scientists, and government not
only led to Maxwell acquiring great wealth but also attracted the interest of
various intelligence agencies — British, Russian, and Israeli among them - all of
which attempted to recruit Maxwell as an asset or as a spy. When MI6 attempted

to recruit Maxwell for the service shortly after the war, it concluded, after
conducting an extensive background check, that Maxwell was a “Zionist — loyal
only to Israel.’* His subsequent relationship with MI6 was choppy and largely
opportunistic on both sides, with Maxwell later laying some of the blame for his
financial troubles on MI6’s alleged attempts to “subvert” him. Yet, it would not be
until the early 1960s that Maxwell was formally approached and successfully
recruited by Israeli intelligence, which sought to make use of his access to the
various prominent businessman and world leaders that he had cultivated while
growing his media empire.>

A few years after being officially recruited as an asset of Israeli intelligence,
Maxwell ran for public office, becoming a member of the British Parliament for
the Labour Party in 1964. His bid for re-election failed, which left him out of
office by 1970. Around that same time, he also lost control of Pergamon Press,
after a failed takeover attempt by Saul Steinberg prompted a government inquiry
into Maxwell’s management of the company. That inquiry concluded that Maxwell
“is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper
stewardship” of a publicly held company.® Nevertheless, Maxwell reacquired
control of the company a few years later in 1974.2

Having nearly lost everything, Maxwell devoted his time to consolidating
control over an ever-growing web of interlocking companies, trusts, and
foundations that now encompassed much more than media concerns. During this
time, he also began developing deep ties to prominent politicians, businessmen,
and their fixers, a group that Maxwell proudly referred to as his “sources.” Among
these early “sources” were soon-to-be UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher;
Israel's biggest arms dealer and one of its powerful oligarchs, Shaul Eisenberg;
financial behemoths such as Edmund Safra; and master manipulators such as
Henry Kissinger. Another early “source” was George H.W.Bush, who was then
part of the Nixon administration and would soon serve as CIA director before
becoming Reagan’s vice president and then US president himself.8

Maxwell’s sources and influence extended well beyond the West, with many of
his most prominent contacts residing in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.
He had cozy relationships with dictators, intelligence officials, and even organized
crime lords such as Semion Mogilevich, sometimes referred to as the “boss of the
bosses” of the Russian mafia.2 It was none other than Robert Maxwell who
orchestrated the entry of Mogilevich-connected companies into the United States,

a move that was accomplished after Maxwell successfully lobbied the state of
Israel to grant Mogilevich and his associates Israeli passports, thereby allowing
them easier access to US financial institutions.

The expansion of Maxwell’s prominent contacts paralleled the growth of his
media empire. By 1980, he had acquired the British Printing Corporation, which
he renamed the Maxwell Communication Corporation. Just a few years later, he
bought the Mirror Group, publisher of the British tabloid the Daily Mirror. This
was followed by his acquisition of publishers like MacMillan and later the New
York Daily News. Money “borrowed” from some Maxwell-owned companies was
allegedly used to finance Mossad activities in Europe and elsewhere; then, the
funds were restored before the absence was noticed by company employees not
privy to these operations. Maxwell later derailed this well-oiled system by dipping
into these same funds to finance his own ostentatious and salacious habits as well
as attempts to further expand his already bloated media empire well beyond its
means.

During this period, Maxwell's ties to Israeli intelligence deepened in other
ways, particularly during the time when Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister.
Shamir, previously a leader of a terrorist group known as Lehi or the Stern Gang,
deeply loathed the United States, a sentiment he confided to Maxwell during one
of Maxwell’s visits to Israel.+ Shamir told Maxwell that he blamed the Americans
for the Holocaust because of the US’ failure to support the transfer of European
Jews to Palestine prior to the war1* Shamir’s very negative views about the US
likely informed Israel’s more aggressive espionage operations that targeted the US
during this time and in which Maxwell prominently figured.

A BROKEN PROMIS

O- of the most brazen and successful operations ever conducted by Israeli
intelligence on a global scale involved its sale of a bugged software program
to governments, corporations, and major financial and scientific institutions
around the world. That software program, known as the Prosecutor’s Information
Management System or PROMIS, was originally created and marketed by Inslaw
Inc., a company created by former NSA official Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy.
In 1982, Inslaw leased its revolutionary PROMIS software to the US Justice
Department, then headed by Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s most trusted

advisor, Attorney General and, later, an advisor to Donald Trump following the
2016 election. The success of the software, which allowed integration of separate
databases and information analysis on a previously unimaginable scale, eventually
caught the attention of Rafi Eitan, the notorious and legendary Israeli spymaster
as well as the handler of the “most damaging spy” in American history, Jonathan
Pollard.“ Eitan, at the time, was serving as the then-head of the now defunct
Israel intelligence service known as Lekem (sometimes written as Lakam), which
focused specifically on espionage related to scientific and technical information
and discoveries. Eitan had first learned of PROMIS some time in 1982. That
December, using the alias Dr. Ben Orr, Eitan entered the US and unsuccessfully
attempted to attend an official demonstration of PROMIS.+ He returned in
February of the following year and was given a demonstration of a new version of
the software, advanced PROMIS, by Bill Hamilton himself.1° During that trip, a
former Inslaw employee then working at the Department of Justice, C. Madison
“Brick” Brewer, gave “Dr. Orr” a copy of the software.4With the software in his
possession, Eitan sought to to install a “trapdoor,’ also often referred to as a back
door, into the software. He would then orchestrate the marketing of this modified
version of PROMIS throughout the world, providing Israeli intelligence with a
direct window into the operations of its enemies and allies. According to the
testimony of ex-Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe, he, on Eitan’s orders,
contacted an Israeli American programmer living in California.1® That programmer
then planted a “trapdoor” or back door into the software that would grant the
Eitan-led Lekem covert access to any database connected to a device on which the
software was installed. To help market the compromised version of PROMIS,
Eitan sought out a man named Earl Brian. Brian was a long-time associate of
Ronald Reagan who had previously worked for the CIA in covert operations,
beginning with the Vietnam-era Phoenix program, and had been in charge of
Reagan’s healthcare program when Reagan was governor of California.”? It was
through his healthcare-related ventures that Brian had first met Eitan.22 In 1982,
however, Brian was attempting to build a new business empire, this one focused
on technology. It was later disclosed that Attorney General Ed Meese’s wife, at the
time, was a major investor in two companies controlled by Earl Brian and those
investments had been made with money loaned to Meese’s wife by a close
associate of Brian’s.24 In speaking with Rafi Eitan, Brian acknowledged the
revolutionary efficacy of PROMIS. The software could track anything, specifically

money and people. Instead of praising its innovative approach to data analysis,
Brian expressed his frustration that the software enabled US federal investigators
to successfully track and target money laundering and other financial crimes. He
also expressed frustration that he had been left out of the profits on PROMIS, the
development of which he had followed closely for several years.22As_ their
conversation wore on, Eitan and Brian hatched a plan about how to best utilize and
market the modified version of PROMIS.” This agreement between Eitan and
Brian eventually led to two different versions of bugged PROMIS software, one
bugged by Israel for the main purpose of spying on the operations of foreign
governments and intelligence services and one bugged by CIA-linked entities and
individuals for the main purpose of engaging in financial espionage and money
laundering. However, what would later become known as the Inslaw affair,
sometimes also called the PROMIS scandal, began first with the version of
PROMIS that had been stolen and then modified by Israel. With the bugged
version of PROMIS ready, Brian attempted to use his company Hadron Inc. to
market the bugged PROMIS software around the world, though he first had tried
to buy out Inslaw to do so. When that effort failed, Brian launched a second effort
to buy out Inslaw using a company called SCT that had been financed by Allen &
Co., the company of the organized crime-linked Charles and Herbert Allen who
were, among other things, business partners of Leslie Wexner’s mentors Max
Fisher and A. Alfred Taubman (see chapter 13). Wired described Allen & Co. as
having “close business ties to Earl Brian” As will be noted in chapter 12, another
figure associated with Earl Brian was Allan Tessler, the lawyer for the Epstein-
connected Gouletas family who was added to the board of Wexner’s The Limited
in the late 1980s. Notably, Allen & Co. owned a significant amount of common
stock in Earl Brian’s Hadron. Unsuccessful and unable to buy out the Hamiltons,
Brian turned to his close friend, then-Attorney General Ed Meese, whose wife, as
previously mentioned, had also invested in Brian’s business ventures. Soon, the
Justice Department abruptly refused to make the payments to Inslaw that had
been stipulated by the contract. They were essentially using the software for free,
which Inslaw claimed was theft.

Meese’s actions forced Inslaw into bankruptcy and Inslaw subsequently sued the
Justice Department, with a US court later finding that the Meeseled department
“took, converted, stole” the software through “trickery, fraud, and deceit”? With
Inslaw out of the way, Brian sold the bugged software to Jordans and Iraq's

intelligence services, a major boon for Israel, and to a handful of companies.
Despite this, Eitan was unsatisfied with Brian and Hadron and their progress in
selling the software. He quickly turned to the person he thought could most
effectively market and sell PROMIS to governments of interest all over the world:
Robert Maxwell.

THE SPY AND THE SALESMAN

N | axwell’s prominent roles in the PROMIS software scandal and the Iran-

Contra affair during the 1980s were facilitated by his purchase of numerous
Israeli companies, several of which were either fronts or “providers of services” for
Israeli intelligence. The most notable of these was Scitex, where Yitzhak Shamir’s
son Nachum was a major executive throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and
Degem, a computer company with a large presence in Central and South America
as well as in Africa.??

According to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, even before Maxwell’s
purchase of Degem, it had been used by Mossad as a cover for agents, particularly
assassins, who would use its offices as a cover before conducting kidnappings and
murders of individuals linked to groups with ties to or sympathies for Israel's
enemies, particularly the PLO.“2 Some of the most notable events occurred in
Africa, where Mossad assassins used Degem as cover to launch killings of
members of the African National Congress. In Latin America, Degem was also
used as cover for the Mossad to infiltrate terrorist and narco-terrorist
organizations such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (known in English as the Shining
Path) and Colombia’s National Liberation Army or ELN.*4

Through Degem and other Maxwell-owned companies based in Israel and
elsewhere, Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israeli intelligence
soon had access to the innermost workings of innumerable governments,
intelligence services, and corporations around the world. Many of Maxwell’s
biggest successes came in selling PROMIS to dictators in Eastern Europe, Africa,
and Latin America. Following the sale, and after Maxwell collected a handsome
pay check, PROMIS’ unparalleled ability to track and surveil anything — from cash
flows to human movement — was used by these governments to commit financial
crimes with greater finesse and also to hunt down and disappear dissidents. Israeli
intelligence, of course, watched it all play out in real time.

In Latin America, for instance, Maxwell sold PROMIS to military dictatorships
in Chile and Argentina. There, PROMIS was used to facilitate the mass murder that
characterized Operation Condor, as the friends and families of dissidents and so-
called subversives were easily identified using PROMIS.22 PROMIS was so
effective for this purpose that, just days after Maxwell sold the software to
Guatemala, its US-backed dictatorship rounded up 20,000 “subversives” who were
never heard from again. Of course, thanks to their backdoor in PROMIS, Israeli
intelligence knew the identities of Guatemala’s disappeared before the victims’
own families. Israel, along with the United States, was also intimately involved in
the arming and training of many of the same Latin American dictatorships that
had been sold the bugged PROMIS software.3

Though Israeli intelligence found obvious use for the steady stream of
sensitive and classified information, their biggest prize was yet to come - top
secret government laboratories in the United States. Eitan tasked Maxwell with
selling PROMIS to US labs in the Los Alamos complex, including Sandia
National Laboratory, which was (and is) at the core of the US nuclear weapons
system. Notably, Maxwell’s eventual sale of PROMIS to these laboratories
occurred during the same period in 1984 when Eitan tasked one of Israel’s top
nuclear experts with supervising Jonathan Pollard’s espionage of U.S. nuclear
secrets on Israel's behalf.

In order to plot how he would accomplish the sale of PROMIS to Los Alamos,
Maxwell consulted one of his “sources,” none other than Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger told him that. in order to sell PROMIS to these sensitive laboratories, he
needed to enlist the services of then-Senator for Texas John Tower, who was the
then-head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.2* At the time, Tower was
searching for lucrative opportunities as the sun was setting on his Senate career.
Maxwell quickly struck a deal with Tower and then, using Mossad money, paid
Tower $200,000 for his services, which included opening doors — not just to the
Los Alamos complex, but also to the Reagan White House.2° Tower would
arrange a trip for Maxwell to travel to Sandia National Laboratory, where he
would market PROMIS. Unlike most other PROMIS sales, this one would not be
handled by Degem, but a US-based company called Information on Demand.

Robert Maxwell had purchased Information on Demand from its founder, Sue
Rugge — a former librarian — through the Pergamon Group in 1982. This was also
the very year plans were made by Rafi Eitan and Earl Brian to subvert PROMIS.4

Its offices were just a few doors down from the home of Isabel Maxwell and her
first husband Dale Djerassi, the son of the scientist credited with creating the birth
control pill.

According to FBI files obtained by Inslaw Inc. via a FOIA request in the
1990s, San Francisco's FBI field office began to look into Information on Demand,
just a year after Maxwell had acquired it. The San Francisco office’s interest in the
company was aroused in October 1983 and the FBI subsequently interviewed
Rugge about the business and its activities.*% She told the FBI that the company’s
sources “include over 250 computer data bases” and that company uses these to
“locate single facts as well as provide answers to complex questions dealing with
such areas as comprehensive marketing research, custom data summaries,
sophisticated literature searching, current awareness service and global
information capability.’

One of these databases included Lockheed’s Dialog database and “the
Defense Technical Center which is connected to the Department of Defense
(DOD) which contains classified information.” She asserted, however, that the
company “has no password for access and further no need for access.’ Elsewhere
in the document, it notes that Information on Demand claimed not have any
access to classified information “to the best of their knowledge,” but did “[include]
information concerning government and various available means of tapping
government information databases.”

The FBI asked Rugge about one client of the company in particular, whose
name and identifying information is redacted in its entirety, but notes that this
mysterious client had worked with Information on Demand since at least 1973.
Subsequent efforts by Inslaw Inc. and others to learn the identity of the redacted
client have been unsuccessful since 1994.

Notably, just one month before the FBI opened an investigation into
Information on Demand and interviewed Sue Rugge, another related Maxwell-
owned firm, Pergamon International Information Corporation (PIIC), had sent a
letter to then-CIA Director Bill Casey, offering to provide the agency with access
to patent databases.22 The only redacted portion of the letter is the identity of
PIIC’s Executive Vice President, who had written the letter to Casey. After Rugge
had been interviewed, FBI interest in Information on Demand peaked in June
1984, when a formal investigation was opened. This took place after two
employees of Sandia National Laboratory, who worked in technology transfer,

approached the Bureau over Information on Demand’s efforts to sell PROMIS to
the laboratory.42 Those employees were compelled to contact the FBI after
obtaining information from employees of the National Security Agency (NSA)
regarding “the purchase of Information on Demand Inc. by one Robert Maxwell,
the owner of Pergamon International.” The specific information on this purchase
from the NSA is included in the report but redacted in its entirety. Two months
later, one of the Sandia employees followed up with the Bureau, suggesting that
the NSA and FBI jointly investigate Information on Demand, but was essentially
stonewalled and told to take it up with FBI headquarters. The FBI case file is
specifically coded as a foreign counter-intelligence investigation, suggesting that
the case was opened because the FBI was made aware of the alleged involvement
of a foreign intelligence service in some aspect of Information on Demand’s
activities that related specifically to the “dissemination, marketing, or sale of
computer software systems, including but not limited to the PROMIS computer
software product.” It also noted that Maxwell himself had previously been the
subject of a “security investigation” conducted by the FBI from 1953 until 1961.
Notably, 1961 is the year that Maxwell was formally recruited as an Israeli
intelligence asset. The FBI investigation likely focused on Information on
Demand’s ties to Mossad, which were later reported by author Gordon Thomas.
Per Thomas, the money used to run and operate Information on Demand’s
California office “would come out of one of the Mossad accounts in Credit
Suisse”

In early August 1984, FBI headquarters and other higher-ups in the Ed
Meese-led Department of Justice, which itself was complicit in the whole sordid
PROMIS affair, ordered the New Mexico office to halt its investigation into
Information on Demand, Maxwell, and PROMIS. The cover-up, oddly enough,
continues today, with the FBI still refusing, decades later, to release documents
pertaining to Robert Maxwell and his role in the PROMIS scandal.43

Several months following the shuttering of the FBI investigation into
Information on Demand, in February 1985 Robert Maxwell again returned to
Sandia National Laboratories, signing the contract for the sale of PROMIS and
listing himself as President and CEO of Information on Demand. A few months
later, he passed that role on to his daughter Christine, who served as the
company’s president and CEO up until her father’s death in 1991, according to her
résumé.“ Upon the collapse of his business empire shortly after his demise, which

also resulted in the closure of Information on Demand, Christine created a
company called Research on Demand that offered similar services and specialized
“in Internet — and Big Data analytics-related market studies for companies in the
Telecoms.” In addition, Isabel Maxwell, who lived in close proximity to the
company’s offices in Berkley, CA, told Haaretz that she had also worked for
Information on Demand, which she refers to as “her sister’s company,’ following

her 1989 divorce from Dale Djerassi.

THE CIA AND PROMIS

A: previously mentioned, there were eventually two different modified
ersions of PROMIS containing different backdoors — the first having been
developed by Israeli intelligence and the second having been developed by CIA-
linked entities and individuals. The CIA version appears to have been focused
mainly on the banking industry while the Israeli/Lekem version seemed to have
been mainly marketed to intelligence agencies and other parts of the public sector
that dealt with classified state information.

Though some authors have tried to paint the CIA’s acquisition of PROMIS as
having happened well after Eitan’s theft of the software, it has since emerged that
the Agency was offered a government copy of PROMIS as far back as 1981,
thanks to a government memo obtained by Emma Best. Best wrote that, despite
the CIA having denied buying the software:

This memo [... ] shows that the Agency was offered the PROMIS software along with a list of
other pieces of government owned software and the hardware necessary to run them. Since CIA
didn’t disclose this or search those records, it’s unknown if they acquired an initial copy of the
software this way. Even if it did not, it undermines their claims to have fully cooperated and
searched every reasonable record and Agency component as they didn’t search their software
requisition records.

The Department of Justice also repeatedly stated that, aside from a notable exception, they
didn’t provide copies of PROMIS to anyone else or distribute it throughout the government.
These memos, however, show that the software was being offered throughout the federal
government from the beginning, making versions of the software readily acquirable for anyone
in the government to review or toy around with prior to Earl Brian and Edwin Meese’s scheme
to defraud INSLAW while modifying (ie. inserting backdoors) and distributing the software

through the U.S. and overseas

This timeline muddles the conventional narrative and raises the possibility that
the supposedly “dueling” versions serving Israeli intelligence and US intelligence

were perhaps more inter-related and collaborative in nature as opposed to
competitive, as some authors like Gordon Thomas have claimed. Ari Ben-
Menashe, in an interview for this book, attested to the collaborative nature
between both the Israeli and CIA’s version of PROMIS, with Robert Maxwell
himself engaging in unspecified collaborations related to the CIA version of
PROMIS.

The CIA version of PROMIS was modified by a man named Michael
Riconosciuto, who altered the software at Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio,
California. At the reservation, Riconosciuto had worked for Wackenhut (now G4S
Security), which — at the time — provided security for critical infrastructure and
high security government facilities. Wackenhut, in 1981, had entered into a joint
venture with the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, which was focused on
establishing a “production facility, called ‘Cabazon Arms, on the one square mile
of Cabazon-owned desert land near Indio”“4 This joint venture was briefly
discussed in the previous chapter. In speaking to author Cheri Seymour,
Riconosciuto noted that the company’s board of directors was stuffed with former
top figures in US intelligence and law enforcement. Riconosciuto corroborated to
Seymour that he had been the one to modify PROMIS and he also fingered Earl
Brian as the mastermind of the scheme. “A man named Earl Brian was
spearheading a plan for worldwide use of the software, but essentially, the
modified software was being pirated from the owners, Bill and Nancy Hamilton,”
Riconosciuto had told Seymour.*® Riconosciuto alleges that he was targeted by
the government after signing an affidavit to assist the Hamiltons’ case. In that
document, he had stated his role in the modification of the PROMIS software.

The modification of PROMIS was hardly Riconosciuto’s first interaction with
intelligence or even with Earl Brian. Per Seymour, Riconosciuto had been
recruited by the CIA while at Stanford University and Riconosciuto “and Earl
Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and had paid $40 million to Iranian officials to
persuade them not to let the hostages go before the presidential election,’ a
scheme better known as the October Surprise (see Chapter 6). Per
Riconosciuto, Brian’s role in the October Surprise was related to his theft of
PROMIS. He later testified that the software “was stolen as a favor to software-
company executive Earl Brian, a friend of Meese’s, for Brian's help in persuading
the Iranian government to hold on to the embassy hostages until the 1980

election was over” $

Regardless of exactly when US intelligence developed and began using a
bugged PROMIS, the software was subsequently developed for many uses,
including on nuclear submarines of the United States and the United Kingdom
and for tracking of nuclear material inventories and long-range ballistic missiles.
However, one of the most unsettling uses of the software, on which both the US
and Israel collaborated, was its use to keep track of dissident Americans.

This use of PROMIS was spearheaded by Oliver North. North had decided to
turn PROMIS’ power against Americans, particularly perceived dissidents.
Beginning in 1982, as part of the highly classified Continuity of Government
(COG) program, North used the PROMIS software at a 6,100-square-foot
“command center” in the Department of Justice, as well as at a smaller operations
room at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents and “potential
troublemakers” if the COG protocol were to ever be invoked. According to a
senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in
five presidential administrations who spoke to Radar in 2008, this was:

A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered
unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and

locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.2~

In 1993, Wired described North's use of PROMIS in compiling this database
as follows:

Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a
political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to
PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright

crudema

The COG program defined this “time of panic” as “a national crisis, such as
nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a
US military invasion abroad,’ whereby the government would suspend the
Constitution, declare martial law, and incarcerate perceived dissidents and other
“unfriendlies” in order to prevent the governments (or then-serving
administration’s) overthrow.** This secretive database has often been referred to as
“Main Core” by government insiders and it still exists today. Journalist
Christopher Ketcham, citing senior government officials, reported in 2008 that, at
that time, Main Core was believed to contain the names of as many as 8 million

Americans.>= Since then, it is highly likely that the number of Americans included
in the Main Core database has grown considerably.

Author and investigative journalist Tim Shorrock also covered other
disturbing aspects of the evolution of Main Core back in 2008 for Salon and
further noted that Main Core, at the time, was said to contain “a vast amount of
personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card
transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA, and other
agencies ”šé

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw had told Shorrock at the time that he believed that
“U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main
Core database” and had been told as much by an intelligence official in 1992 and
an NSA official in 1995.24 Dan Murphy, former deputy director at the CIA, had
told Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS was “so seriously wrong that money
alone cannot cure the problem.’ “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding
to Main Core,” Hamilton had told Shorrock.“8

In 2019, citing a former US intelligence official with direct knowledge of the
US. intelligence community’s use of PROMIS and Main Core from the 1980s to
2000s, I reported that Israeli intelligence played a role in the U.S. government’s
deployment of PROMIS as the software used for the Main Core domestic
surveillance database system.*2 Per this source, Israeli intelligence remained
involved with Main Core at the time of the August 1991 death of journalist Danny
Casolaro. This same official told me that, shortly before his death, Casolaro had
obtained copies of computer printouts from the PROMIS-based Main Core
domestic surveillance database system from NSA whistleblower Alan Standorf,
among other items. Standorf was found murdered a few months before Casolaro’s
life-less body was discovered in a hotel room.

The source also stated that Main Core’s contents had been used for the
political blackmail of members of Congress and their staff, journalists, and others
by Walter Raymond, a senior CIA covert operator in psyops and disinformation
who served on President Reagan's National Security Council after Main Core was
created.* If used for this purpose by Raymond in the 1980s, it is highly likely that
Main Core has also been used by other individuals with access to the database for
blackmailing purposes in the years since. In addition to their collaboration on
Main Core, there is also the possibility that the CIA and Israel’s Lekem
collaborated and shared at least some of the intelligence reaped from the different

versions of PROMIS. As previously detailed, Israeli intelligence and the CIA were
already collaborating on major aspects of Iran-Contra during this same period.
Yet, these networks also appear to have been intimately involved with the sale of
the PROMIS software themselves.

For instance, one connection of Iran-Contra to PROMIS can be seen in the
visit Contra leaders made to Cabazon for weapons demonstrations, which was
mentioned in the previous chapter. Another clear example of overlap is Robert
Maxwell. Yet, another and arguably the most compelling evidence for the overlap
can be found in a 1985 letter written by William Bradford Reynolds, Assistant
Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division, to William F. Weld, then-the US
Attorney in Boston. The letter told Weld that PROMIS (misspelled as Promise in
the letter) was being provided to Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire
and banker who had owned a personal 20% stake in BCCI and was mentioned in
connection with BCCI in Chapter 7.

That letter states the following:

Dear Mr. Weld: As agreed Messrs. Manichur [sic] Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi, and Richard
Armitage will broker the transaction of Promise [sic] software to Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz for
resale and general distribution as gifts in his region contingent upon the three conditions we last
spoke of. Promise [sic] must have a soft arrival. No paperwork, customs, or delay. It must be
equipped with the special data retrieval unit. As before, you must walk the financial aspects
through Credit Suisse into National Commercial Bank [which bin Mahfouz chaired]. If you
encounter any problems contact me directly. Sincerely, WM. Bradford Reynolds, Assistant

Attorney General Civil Rights Division £2

This letter implicates key figures involved in Iran-Contra weapons deals, i.e.
Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar, as also selling PROMIS software for covert purposes.
In this case, they were specifically selling it to a man tied to the banking industry,
more specifically BCCI. As it turns out, the global banking industry was a major
target of the bugged PROMIS software. As will be mentioned shortly, this was
partially facilitated by BCCI and affiliated entities as BCCI was known to use
PROMIS and had other connections to its illicit uses.

One of the key companies involved with the bugged PROMIS'’ entry into the
global financial system was tied to a major figure in BCCI’s entry into the
American financial system, Jackson Stephens, discussed in the previous chapter as
well as chapter 7. While Israel's bugged version of PROMIS was being marketed
worldwide by Robert Maxwell and his front companies, the CIA’s equivalent was
marketed, in part, by the Jackson Stephens-owned Systematics.

Systematics was a data-processing company that, like other prominent
Stephens-owned firms, was represented by the Rose Law Firm, which — as noted
in the last chapter — had deep ties to the Clinton family and its political machinery.
Two partners in the Rose Law Firm who would later serve in the Clinton
administration, Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell, went on to acquire significant
financial interests in Systematics through ownership in Alltel, which acquired
Systematics in the early 1990s. Notably, Rose had also represented Systematics
as part of a lawsuit related to the efforts of Jackson Stephens and others to bring
BCCI into the American financial system. As noted in chapter 7, Systematics was
a defendant alongside Jackson Stephens, another Stephens owned company
Stephens Inc., Agha Hasan Abedi, Bert Lance, and Eugene Metzger relating to
their hostile takeover attempt of FGB. Rose Law represented Systematics in this
lawsuit. As was also noted in chapter 7, Stephens had been involved in BCCI’s
affairs because he “wanted FGB to use a company he controlled, Systematics Inc.,
for its data processing business.”

Unlike Maxwell's fronts used to market PROMIS, Systematics was more
focused on selling software and data-processing services to financial institutions
than governments and intelligence agencies. Acquired by Stephens in the 1960s,
Systematics primarily serviced banks and, by the 1990s, was “one of the leading
vendors in the United States and, reportedly, in some 40 foreign countries, of
computer software and services for the banking industry.”

According to former Forbes assistant editor James Norman in his book The Oil
Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century, Systematics was also “a primary
vehicle or front company for the National Security Agency in the 1980s and early
1990s to market and implant bugged software in the world’s major money-center
banks and clearinghouses as part of the Reagan/Bush ‘follow the money’ effort to
break the Soviets.”& The late journalist Michael Ruppert and others have asserted
that this “bugged software” was none other than the PROMIS software. Ruppert
specifically cited Systematics as “a primary developer of PROMIS for financial
intelligence use”ćć

Norman, in his reporting which was censored by Forbes, alluded to the role of
National Security Council member Norman Bailey in urging the involvement of
the NSA in surveilling the flow of money through SWIFT, Fedwire, CHIPS, and
other financial transfer mechanisms. In his censored report, Norman wrote that
Bailey “confirms that within a few years the National Security Agency ... had

begun vacuuming up mountains of data by listening in on bank wire traffic. It
became a joint effort of several Western governments with the Israelis playing a
leading role.” Norman further noted that the NSA’s ability to spy on financial
transactions was directly enabled by Systematics.

As will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 16, Norman had learned that
one of the main individuals overseeing this NSA program for Systematics was
Vince Foster of Rose Law and subsequently the deputy White House counsel
during Bill Clinton's first term until his death in 1993.

Yet, Norman's censored report, later published in Media Bypass magazine,
went even further and revealed that Systematics not only aided NSA surveillance
of the financial system, it was also intimately linked to money laundering efforts:

Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its founding, sources say, as a
money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret that there were billions of dollars moving
around in “black” accounts — from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola
and other countries to paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine CIA drug
dealing. Having taken over the complete computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an
“outsource” supplier of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that
covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day disguised as a

routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction.ŚZ

Norman also alleges that Jackson Stephens’ efforts to bring BCCI into the US
were related to this situation:

Systematics’ money-laundering role for the intelligence community might help explain why
Jackson Stephens tried to take over Washington-based Financial General Bankshares in 1978 on
behalf of Arab backers of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI’s links to
global corruption and intelligence operations has been well documented, though many
mysteries remain.

According to a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Stephens insisted
on having then-tiny Systematics brought in to take over all the bank’s data processing.
Representing Systematics in that 1978 SEC case: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webster
Hubbell. Stephens was blocked in that takeover. But FGB, later renamed First American,
ultimately fell under the domination of BCCI through Robert Altman and former Defense Sec.
Clark Clifford. According to a technician who worked at First American in Atlanta, Systematics

became a key computer contractor there anyway 28

A 1995 document sent on behalf of Inslaw’s founders to then-independent
Counsel Ken Starr by Inslaw lawyer Elliot Richardson supports several of
Norman’s claims. That document states that Systematics had “covertly implanted
[software] into the computers of its bank customers” that allowed “allied

intelligence agencies surreptitiously to track and monitor the flow of money
through the banking system” and had done so at “the behest of the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA) and its partner in Israeli intelligence” ® Inslaw also stated
that the software was used by these same intelligence agencies in the “laundering
of money, especially drug profits.”

Systematics did, in fact, appear to have ties to Israeli intelligence, as
Richardson asserts. The company was known to have a subsidiary in Israel that,
according to a former Israeli intelligence officer, was operated by contractors for
the Mossad and sold software to banks and telecommunications companies.“
According to Richardson's letter, that Israeli subsidiary of Systematics also had a
Massachusetts-based front company, which was partially owned by a former U.S.
intelligence official named Harry Weschler. Furthermore, Systematics also had
dealings with Israel’s PROMIS salesman par excellence, Robert Maxwell.
According to Bill Hamilton of Inslaw as cited by Cheri Seymour, Systematics
entered into a joint venture with Robert Maxwell, who was allegedly acting on
Israel's behalf. In that venture, Maxwell and Systematics sold bugged versions of
PROMIS to five banks, most of which were Swiss. This again suggests that the
“CIA version” of PROMIS was more of a complement to the “Israeli version”
Robert Maxwell was best known for marketing, rather than a competitor. It also
further hints at collaboration between Israeli and US intelligence for the purpose
of placing backdoors into global financial flows.

This focus on obtaining a secret window into the in and out-flows of the global
banking system enabled not only the covert tracking of funds, but presumably
allowed funds to be covertly hidden and financial crimes to be effectively covered
up or rendered invisible. This was likely why BCCI employed the PROMIS
software after its theft by the DOJ, as one of its subsidiaries, First American Bank,
reportedly “filtered PROMIS money” (i.e., laundered the money generated from
the sale of the stolen PROMIS software), according to the late journalist Danny
Casolaro.4

Returning to the matter of Vince Foster, the Hamiltons of Inslaw have also
provided considerable evidence that Foster’s distress prior to his 1993 death
appears to have been related to concerns about litigation involving Systematics
and PROMIS.” James Norman, the previously mentioned journalist who was
then writing for Forbes, reported in 1995 that Foster had been known to be under
counterintelligence surveillance at the time of his death. Norman has also stated

that it was suspected at the time that an adversarial government, allegedly the
Chinese, had bought “high-level code, encryption, and other secrets via Foster's
Swiss bank account and Israeli banks” and that Forbes had declined to publish
these allegations (and by extension Norman’s reporting on the matter) because,
among other concerns, they didn’t want to make any public statements about
Systematics’ role in the affair. As will again be noted in chapter 16, another
assistant editor of Forbes at the time, alongside Norman, was the daughter of
Harry Weschler, the former CIA official who partially owned the Israeli subsidiary
of Systematics. Norman subsequently intimated that this connection played a role
in the censoring of his reporting.

Vince Foster’s death, which many regard as suspicious despite it being
officially labelled a suicide, is discussed in more detail in chapter 16, as the very
event that marked one of Jeffrey Epstein’s earliest visits to the Clinton White
House makes an odd appearance in Foster's controversial “suicide note.”

E-SYSTEMS

Art: company that surfaces in the allegations surrounding Systematics and
he Inslaw affair is E-Systems, a Dallas-based defense contractor specializing
in computer software and systems. Authors James Norman and J. Orlin Grabbe
have both discussed E-Systems as having a particularly close relationship with
Systematics. However, the CEO of Alltel, a successor company to Systematics has
denied that any such relationship exists. Among the claims made by Grabbe and
Norman is that sensitive E-Systems computer code ended up in the hands of Israel
a mere thirty days after it was first deployed by the NSA.2

While parsing out the details of the connections between E-Systems and
Systematics is difficult, E-Systems did maintain a tight connection with another
corporation located at the heart of the Inslaw affair: Wackenhut. William Raborn,
who had served as director of the CIA under President Lyndon Johnson, joined
the board of directors of Wackenhut in 1971.2 Press reports show that by at least
1977, he had also joined the board of E-Systems. Wackenhut annual reports
illustrate that, for a time, he served on the board of these companies
simultaneously.

E-Systems’ connections to the intelligence community are long-standing. The
company began in the 1960s as LTV Electrosystems, a wholly-owned subsidiary

of Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), the Texas-based defense contractor that was then
rapidly expanding due to military contracts related to the Vietnam War®2 As
discussed in chapter 6, LTV shared multiple connections with First International
Bancshares, the CIA-linked bank that George H.W. Bush joined in 1976. LTV
Electrosystems held a major share of the defense contracts that LTV received,
having been consolidated with another major LTV subsidiary, LTV Military
Electronics Division. In 1972, LTV Electrosystems was spun off as an
independent company, and rechristened as E-Systems under the leadership of
John W. Dixon, its new president and chairman.

As the presence of William Raborn on its board shows, E-Systems maintained
a cozy relationship with the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. E-Systems
has attempted to keep this relationship under wraps, with much of the company’s
projects shrouded under confidentiality agreements. Nevertheless, there have
been occasions when the company’s intelligence ties have bubbled up to the
surface. In 1994, for example, Washington Post journalist John Mintz wrote that:

CIA employees who are experts in high technology are “automatic hires” for the firm, a former
CIA official said. “E-Systems made it a point to say, ‘When you retire, come work for us.” ... “E-
Systems has one of the more unique relationships with the agency,” he added, calling it
“chummy.”

A staff member of a congressional intelligence committee said E-Systems is “virtually
indistinguishable” from the agencies it serves. “Congress will ask for a briefing from E-Systems,
and the [CIA] program manager shows up,” he said. “Sometimes he gives the briefing. They’re

interchangeable”82

Among the known collaborations between E-Systems and the Agency
included the construction of “ground stations in China” used to “eavesdrop on
Soviet satellites in flight” - the information from which was then “shared with
China.” In another notable instance, taking place in 1975, E-Systems purchased
Air Asia, one of the CIA's proprietary airlines that was hidden as a civilian-staffted
aviation company.** The sale garnered considerable controversy at the time as E-
Systems only paid $1.9 million for the front company, despite the fact that Air
Asias net worth was calculated to be approximately $3.4 million at the time of
sale.ŝš

Several years later, in 1977, E-Systems became involved in Operation Condor,
a DEA and US Customs supported Mexican government initiative to crack down
on the ballooning drug trade. It was a completely different operation than the
notorious South American operation of the same name.

On hand to support Condor was the CIA, with Evergreen International
Aviation providing Mexican authorities with planes and pilots.ŝć That same year,
Evergreen had absorbed Intermountain Aviation, a CIA proprietary airline, and
placed the “former head of all CIA air operations” on its board of directors. E-
Systems was contracted to provide maintenance for Evergreen’s planes actively
participating in Condor, a task no doubt related to the company’s wider contracts
with US Customs for electronic technology and aircraft maintenance for drug
interdiction purposes.*4

Remarkably (and perhaps unsurprisingly), Condor was an abject failure, and
it effectively allowed the drug trade to continue unabated. Where planes were
supposed to be spraying herbicides on drug crops, the tanks were frequently
found to instead contain water, while officials involved with the program had a
tendency to shake down “drug cultivators in exchange for protection from
spraying” 8$

Tom Farer notes that Condor in fact encouraged the deepening centralization
and concentration of the drug trade within a small handful of powerful cartel-
linked groups. “As a result of this of this policy initiative,” he writes, “the Mexican
drug industry came under the control of entrepreneurial organizations that were
fewer in number, stronger in resources, and more dangerous to society and
government”? Chief among the drug traffickers that rose in prominence in this
time was Felix Gallardo and his criminal associate, Juan Matta Ballesteros. As
noted in chapter 7, both of these figures were linked to Contra support activities
and, in the case of Matta, to CIA-linked aviation companies.

E-Systems may have also been linked to the activities of both Ted Shackley
and his team and that of Robert Vesco in Libya. As discussed in chapter 6, a point
of intersection between these two networks was the British company Lonrho, its
infamous leader Tiny Rowland, and his right-hand man Edward Du Cann. To
briefly recap: Du Cann, whose duties extended beyond Lonrho to act as a
liquidator for the Vesco-looted Investors Overseas Services (IOS), sat on the
board of a Lonrho freight subsidiary called Tradewinds, which was accused of
running arms into Libya on behalf of Shackley’s close associate, Edwin Wilson. At
this same time, Vesco was involved in a number of Libyan affairs, several of which
blew back on the Carter administration — an administration despised by Shackley
and a number of his “former” CIA colleagues. One of these was an attempt to get
embargoed planes released to Libya, which included a number of C-130 aircraft.

At around this same time, E-Systems was in talks to update a number of C-
130s, located in Australia, that a group of individuals was attempting to sell to
Libya. This group was led by L.T. “Bill” Ransom, head of a Texas-based aircraft
broker firm called Global Jet Sales, and included Max Park of Parmax, Inc. (which
shared addresses with Ransom’s Global Jet); Stanley Mann, a petroleum broker;
and Admiral E.L. “Whitey” Feightner, an aviation consultant and retired military
officer.2+ Also involved was Jack Richards, an aircraft broker from Oklahoma City.
Richards’ firm, Onyx Aviation, was later named during the Iran-Contra hearings as
one of the firms that had provided aircraft for the Contras in Nicaragua.22

Ransom’s attempts to sell the C-130s to Libya ultimately fell apart, and it isn't
clear if E-Systems ended up working on the aircraft. The route the planes ended up
taking, however, is still quite interesting. Aviation records show that a number of
these planes passed from the hands of Ransom and Park to Ford & Vlahos, a
powerful San Francisco law firm.” The “Ford” in Ford & Vlahos was John Ford,
who had ties to another aviation company, T & G Aviation, based in Chandler,
Arizona.” Chandler is a suburb of Phoenix roughly an hour’s drive from Marana,
where the aforementioned CIA-linked Evergreen Aviation maintained its aircraft
maintenance center. According to whistle-blower Gary Eitel (himself a former
Evergreen pilot), T & G-owned aircraft “were doing work for Southern Air and
Evergreen in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi” that was disguised as contract work for
Bechtel.2°

From Ford & Vlahos, the C-130s ended up in a number of intriguing
locations. Records show that a number ended up in the hands of an aviation
concern owned by the Aboitiz family in the eee who had grown
particularly wealthy and powerful under the Marcos regime.” Another was sold
to AVIACO of Bogota, Colombia, a company described in the press as part of the
“air wing’ of the Colombian cartels,’ having been “involved in [drug] smuggling

since 198228

Yet another ended up parked at Mena, Arkansas, before being
bought by a Miami company, African Air Trans.” This is the same C-130 that was
discussed in the previous chapter, having been seized by Customs for arms
trafficking violations. As discussed in that chapter, African Air Trans was itself a
front for an “unnamed Israeli living in Panama.”

The question remains: was the initial attempt, which involved E-Systems, to
sell these C-130s to Libya part of the broader calculus involving that country by

Vesco, Shackley, and others? Answers to this question remain elusive, though

there is one provocative tie that suggests these may all have been interrelated
incidents.

Stanley Mann, the member of Ransom’s group that attempted the initial C-
130 sale, was closely connected to and had providing financing for Andrew Racz,
the head of Racz International, a subsidiary of the Philips, Appel & Walden
brokerage house in New York.“ Declassified US State Department cables show
that Racz was also associated with Tiny Rowland (as well as Henry Kissinger),
and had acted as a back-channel between the government and the Lonrho chief

concerning African affairs 104

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Ne only was the PROMIS scandal linked with the US Department of Justice,

the CIA, and Israeli intelligence, but major elements of organized crime
could also be found in its web. For instance, one of the key figures involved in the
PROMIS scandal was Robert Booth Nichols. Nichols served on the board of First
Intercontinental Development Corporation (FIDCO) alongside Clint Murchison
Jr., a business tycoon with organized crime connections; and Robert Maheu, the
private investigator who was an intermediary between the CIA and organized
crime and who author Lisa Pease has linked to the 1968 assassination of Robert F.
Kennedy.+? Maheu was FIDCO’s vice president while Nichols was the company’s
Senior Vice President and Chairman of the Investment Committee22 FIDCO,
per Riconosciuto, was “an NSC [National Security Council] corporate cut-out
[...] created to be the corporate vehicle to secure the financing for the
reconstruction of the cities of Beirut and Damour in Lebanon.” Riconosciuto
further alleged that, in his dealings with FIDCO in the Middle East, he “came in
contact with the PROMIS software” via a system from “IBM Tel Aviv.“

In 1981, Nichols formed Meridian Arms with a man named Peter Zokosky.
Meridian would later join Wackenhut in its Cabazon-related activities. Michael
Riconosciuto had also been Meridian’s vice president on the board of directors
alongside Nichols and Zokosky for a brief period+® Meridian Arms was a
subsidiary of Meridian International Logistics, and that company’s board of
directors included Nichols, Zokosky and Eugene Gianquinto. Gianquinto was
notably the president of the Home Entertainment Division of MCA, the
entertainment giant that was later acquired by the Bronfmans’ Seagram Company

and reincorporated as Universal Studios. One of MCA’s top executives, as noted in
chapter 1, was Lew Wasserman, who was deeply connected to organized crime,
particularly through Moe Dalitz, and was largely responsible for Ronald Reagan's
political career.°° When Reagan took office, the Department of Justice had been
probing MCA‘ ties to organized crime, but — thanks to help from Reagan's
Attorney General Ed Meese — the probe was squashed. The Wasserman-Reagan
relationship and Wasserman’s organized crime ties are discussed in more detail in
the next chapter. Another member of the MCA board at this time, Senator
Howard Baker, would also later “advise” Robert Maxwell about his entry into New
York in the early 1990s, alongside John Tower and Robert Keith Gray. Baker was
also a business partner of Maxwell’s at that time (see Chapter 15 for more).+™%

According to Cheri Seymour, both Gianquinto of MCA and Nichols of
Meridian “had a close working relationship with the Justice Department” and
Gianquinto, in a recorded FBI wiretapped conversation referenced by Seymour,
took credit for contacting Meese to have the DOJ’s MCA-organized crime probe
quashed in the early 1980s.1°% One of the special prosecutors for the Justice
Department who had worked on the MCA case, Richard Stavin, obtained
documents that identified Nichols as “a money launderer with ties to the
Gambino crime family and the Yakuza [ Japanese organized crime].”4°

Per Seymour, Nichols also had ties to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines,
having “reportedly laundered between $50-200 million” on his behalf.U2 Nichols
was also investigated by the FBI in the late 1970s for money laundering for
Marcos as well as drug smuggling. That investigation also found evidence that
Nichols had also sold weapons to the Marcos government and other foreign
governments. Much of his money laundering activities, including those on behalf
of the Marcos family reportedly involved the Swiss banking system. The FBI
found that Nichols had claimed to have had access to “highly sophisticated
computers in Switzerland with detailed information on a number of subjects,”
suggesting that Nichols may have been using PROMIS as part of his Swiss
laundromat. H2

Nichols, according to the FBI report, had also claimed “to have highly placed
sources in numerous foreign government agencies which can detect any
investigation initiated against him. One of these individuals was supposedly a
United States Senator with much seniority whom Nichols claimed to utilize in the

trafficking of narcotics and money laundering” Given that Nichols, via Eugene

Gianquinto, was just one degree of separation from Senator Howard Baker, who
was also on the board of the organized crime-linked MCA and later engaged in
suspect business activities with Robert Maxwell, the Tennessee senator seems like
a potential suspect.

Nichols also loomed large in the tragic fate of journalist Danny Casolaro.
Casolaro had been investigating an international crime syndicate he termed “the
Octopus” at the time of his death in 1991. Casolaro believed that this “Octopus”
involved powerful individuals in the private and public sectors as well as the
criminal underworld and that they were collectively responsible for some of the
biggest scandals of the 1980s, including Iran-Contra, BCCI and the theft of the
PROMIS software.

“Dan dealt in this nebulous, shadowy world,’ Dick O’Connell, a friend of
Casolaro’s and publisher of Washington Crime News Services said in mid-August
1991 to the Associated Press. “He was saying ‘they’ took that INSLAW software
and sold it overseas and took the profits from that and turned it into arms for the
Contras.... That’s what he was working on and he told me he thought BCCI was
the conduit for all of these money transactions? +4

Cheri Seymour notes that Casolaros work on “the Octopus” had
“encompassed the October Surprise story, the Inslaw computer software case, the
Iran/Contra affair, the BCCI scandal, and MCA entertainment corporation, all
overlapping and interconnecting into one network.’ Before his death, Casolaro
had called this network “a dirty CIA ‘Old Boy’ network” that, per Seymour, “had
begun working together in the 1950s around the Albania covert operations. These
men had gotten into the illegal gun and drug trade back then and had continued in
that business ever since?” H5

Shortly before his death, Casolaro had told friends and family that he was
close to concluding his investigation. Several people close to him had seen
documents involving money transfers involving BCCI and the World Bank to
people involved in these scandals, such as Earl Brian and Adnan Khashoggi.

In July 1991, something strange happened and Casolaro suddenly became
“somewhat alarmed.’ It appears to have been a threat from Robert Booth Nichols,
who had initially been a source for Casolaro, before warning him “If you continue
this investigation, you will die.” Casolaro, later that same month, learned from
former DOJ special prosecutor Richard Stavin that Nichols was deeply enmeshed

in organized crime networks as well as intelligence networks.

Shortly thereafter, on August Sth, 1991, Michael Riconosciuto contacted Bill
Hamilton and asked him to use his sources to dig up info on a man named Mike
Abbell.“2 Abbell had worked at the Department of Justice in the early 1980s,
where he was director of the Office of International Affairs before going into
private legal practice.! Hamilton ultimately passed the task of investigating
Abbell over to Casolaro, who contacted his own sources about ties between
Abbell, Robert Booth Nichols, and Gilberto Rodriguez, an early leader of the Cali
cartel. The Cali cartel’s connections to Contra support efforts and to E-Systems
were discussed in chapter 7 and earlier in this chapter, respectively. Years later, in
1994, Abbell’s law offices were raided by the FBI in connection with an
investigation to Cali cartel money laundering and Abbell was subsequently
charged and convicted for being directly involved in the cartel’s activities

The following day, Casolaro traveled to Martinsburg, Virginia, to meet with
some sources to get the final piece of the puzzle and “bring back the head of the
Octopus.’ Two days after arriving in Martinsburg, Casolaro was found dead in his
hotel room and his briefcase full of his research notes and evidence was missing.
His death was ruled a suicide.

Many, including Casolaro’s family, do not believe that Casolaro committed
suicide. A week before his death, Casolaro told his brother he had been receiving
death threats and the manner in which he died, deep slashes in his arms, was not
consistent with Casolaro’s well-known squeamishness around even minor
amounts of blood. Speculation only grew following the FBI investigation, given
that the FBI lied to Congress, pressured its own agents not to question whether it
was a suicide, and lost 90 percent of its files related to Casolaro’ss death - among
other glaring inconsistencies. 22

In a 1994 letter provided to me in 2019 by Inslaw Inc., Inslaw lawyer Charles
Work told then-Assistant Attorney General John Dwyer that one of Inslaw’s
confidential sources in government had stated that Casolaro had been injected
with a substance that deadened his nerves from the neck down, explaining the
apparent lack of struggle on Casolaro’s part, and that the substance used had come
from the US Army inventory.

The person who had arranged Casolaro’s final meeting before his death was a
US military intelligence officer named Joseph Cuellar. Prior to Casolaro’s death,
Cuellar had promised to arrange a meeting between Casolaro and Peter
Videnieks, “a Department of Justice contracting official with responsibility for the

PROMIS software” who was a close associate of Earl Brian. Videnieks, before
joining the Department of Justice, had previously worked as a contracting officer
at US Customs during the years of Operation Condor and was in a position where
he could have handled contracts related to E-Systems and Evergreen International.

The same year that Casolaro died, there were several other suspicious deaths
involving people directly connected to the PROMIS scandal or involved in
Casolaro’s investigation of “the Octopus” - including Alan Standorf, one of
Casolaro’s sources; Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell and the
intelligence-linked salesman of the bugged PROMIS software; and John Tower
— the former Texas senator who assisted Maxwell in selling the bugged PROMIS
software to the Los Alamos laboratories. Other aspects of Robert Maxwell’s
death are dealt with in Chapter 15.

Around this same time, the PROMIS scandal or Inslaw Affair itself became
too unruly, especially after several Congressional investigations concluded
wrongdoing by the Justice Department and called for a special prosecutor to be
appointed. That appointment was made by none other than the then-Attorney
General under George H.W. Bush, William Barr. As previously mentioned in
Chapter 8, Barr had not only had an alleged role in major aspects of Iran-Contra
under the alias Robert Johnson, but he had begun his career at the CIA. As will be
discussed in Chapter 11, Barr’s employment with the CIA overlapped with his
father’s decision to hire Jeffrey Epstein at the Dalton School, which would prove
essential in Epstein’s rise to prominence in these same networks.

Early on, Barr essentially stonewalled Congress by denying Congressmen
access to “privileged” documents related to PROMIS and Inslaw Inc., much like
he had done years earlier when he stonewalled the Church Committee on behalf
of the CIA. As a result, a Congressional hearing was held in December 1990 on
Barr’s continued refusal to make the documents available.° After considerable
political pressure, Barr moved to appoint a special counsel to “investigate” the
Inslaw affair, appointing a retired judge from Chicago named Nicholas Bua to
serve in that role in September 1992.124 Bua authored a 267-page report, which he
completed in early 1993, that claimed to find no credible evidence to support the
Hamilton's allegations and the report has been widely criticized as a “whitewash”
of the whole situation.128

After Inslaw’s Bill Hamilton distributed Inslaw’s heavily detailed rebuttal of
the “Bua report” to members of House Judiciary Committee, Congressmen Jack

Brooks (D-TX) and Charlie Rose (D-NC) attempted to force an investigation of
the Justice Department as it related to PROMIS as well as an investigation into the
death of journalist Danny Casolaro and the payment of reparations to the
Hamiltons. Despite their best efforts, and the continued efforts of the Hamiltons
through the decades, the PROMIS scandal, Casolaro’s death, and other matters
that swirl around the entity Casolaro called “the Octopus” remain largely
uninvestigated by the federal government (and most of mainstream media) to this
day.

CDC AND TECH TRANSFERS

A previously mentioned, prior to Casolaro’s death, those close to the
journalist had seen documents involving money transfers involving the
World Bank to people involved in these scandals, such as Earl Brian and Adnan
Khashoggi. In addition, it was reported by economist and author J. Orlin Grabbe
that this particular version of PROMIS in use by the World Bank was being used
to track wire transfers “in connection with a money-laundering operation that

went from BCCI London through the World Bank and into Caribbean

institutions.” 222

The role of the World Bank in the PROMIS scandal has been largely
unexplored. However, the trail left by the company that managed PROMIS for the
financial institution, Control Data Corporation, itself leads to a different, yet
parallel operation involving technology transfers to the Soviet Union. Both
Robert Maxwell and, subsequently, the Gouletas family, close associates of Jeffrey
Epstein, would have their own runins with the company.

Control Data Corporation was originally formed in 1946 under the name
Engineering Research Associates (ERA). ERA had been created by a group of
engineers who had worked for a wartime Naval division involved in code-breaking
and cryptography called the Communications Supplementary Activity. The core
ERA team eventually broke away from the original company and formed Control
Data Corporation (CDC) in September 1957. From the beginning, CDC was a
major defense contractor.

During the 1970s, CDC computers were installed at Sandia National
Laboratories, which would become the target of Robert Maxwell’s marketing of
PROMIS roughly a decade later. CDC had developed special code expressly for

the products it sold to Sandia, which — as previously mentioned — dealt with
aspects of the US nuclear program.42° CDC computers, also containing specially
designed code, were also present at Oak Ridge Laboratories, which also played a
role in development of the nuclear program.

CDC also had a long-standing relationship with the Soviet Union’s nuclear
laboratories and facilities during this same period. Congressional hearings from

the mid-1970s revealed that:

In 1968, a second-generation Control Data Corporation 1604 system was installed at the Dubna
Soviet Nuclear Facility near Moscow. In 1972 [CDC] sold the Soviet Union a third-generation
CDC 6200 system computer. For these systems, [CDC’s] operating statement had improved by
about $3 million dollars in the past three years. And the Soviet Union has gained 15 years in

computer technology.

As seen here, CDC’s business in the USSR raised concerns that the company
was engaging in technology transfers to the United States’ ostensible arch-enemy
at the height of the Cold War. Such concerns would continue to follow the
company for decades.

Around this same period, in the early 1970s, CDC acquired the Commercial
Credit Corporation (CCC), which had nearly gone bankrupt during the
calamitous bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970. That bankruptcy, the nation’s
largest until the collapse of Enron several decades later, is discussed in greater
detail in the next chapter.+2 In the years that followed, CDC and its newly
acquired subsidiary CCC would become involved with the networks of Shackley’s
“private CLA” and “rogue” CIA agent (and alleged sex blackmailer) Edwin Wilson.

As previously detailed in Chapter 7, CCC played a key role in the creation of
Global International Airways, a company created in the late 1970s by Farhad
Azima, an Iranian businessman reportedly tied to Irans pre-revolutionary
intelligence service - SAVAK. That airline had been launched with the aid of a
“multi-million dollar loan from the Commercial Credit Corporation” and was
allegedly tied to Shackley’s network as well as Air America (known by this time as
Southern Air Transport). Global International Airways had worked with
EATSCO, the company tied to the Shackley-Cline “Private CIA” network that
served as a “middle man” in arms deals.

Also noted in Chapter 6 is the fact that CDC itself, around 1976 or so, had
directly hired Edwin Wilson as a consultant with the hopes that Wilson's contacts
could help the company “unload some outdated computers on Third World

countries.’ However, CDC appears to have leveraged Wilson’s abilities for much
more, as the “rogue” CIA agent was accused of bugging the US Army’s Materiel
Command on behalf of the company. Considering these associations and
activities, CDC was likely much more than just a computer company and its
public claims that the company was not involved in illicit, high-technology
transfers to the Soviet Union seem dubious at best.

After the aforementioned Congressional hearing in 1974, CDC made an
apparent move at increasing its role in technology transfers, despite political
concern. By the late 1970s, they had established a new subsidiary called
Worldtech, described in the press as “a division of Control Data Corp that does
research and consulting on, and brokering of, technology transfers” 33

Once Worldtech was established by CDC, it entered into a joint venture in
1979 with Greek publisher George Bobolas that was called Worldtech Hellas Ltd.,
where 70% was owned by Bobolas and 20% was owned by CDC. The owner of
the remaining 10% was not disclosed in reports at the time.

A 1979 letter from one of Bobolas’ companies to A. Afonin, identified as a
“representative of the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations of the
USSR Council of Ministers,” proposed the creation of a “joint development
company using Worldtech for ‘world-wide technology transfer’ and stressed that
“Worldtech Hellas Ltd. will give a lot of help’ to ‘technology transfer on an
international base?” 134 After journalist Paul Anastasi published information about
Bobolas and called him a “KGB agent of influence,’ one of his companies,
Bobtrade, asserted that “no improper transfer of high technology was involved,”
while CDC moved to dissolve their partnership, likely due to bad publicity.+35

Around the time that Worldtech was being created, CDC’s then-executive
vice president, Robert D. Schmidt, was part of the American Committee on US-
Soviet Relations (ACUSR, previously the American Committee on East-West
Accord). Other members at the time, specifically in 1977, included Robert
Maxwell’s lawyer and confidant, Samuel Pisar (stepfather to future US Secretary of
State Anthony Blinken), as well as Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, who would become
US ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1979.136 Another member was Paul
Ziftren, previously discussed in Chapter 1 as a major figure in the organized crime
networks that ran through Hollywood, including those tied up with Lew
Wasserman and MCA. Ziffren’s and Wasserman’s families would later intermarry.

By the mid-1980s, Occidental Petroleum executives Armand Hammer and
William McSweeney would also join the ACUSR. ACUSR member Samuel Pisar
also represented Hammer's business interests. As previously mentioned in
Chapter 7, Hammer served as a back channel between the Americans and the
Soviets and had been involved in the entry of BCCI into the US financial system.
Also noted was the fact that he had originally sought to acquire FGB himself for
the purpose of financially blackmailing US politicians. It is also worth mentioning
again that Hammer’s father, Julius Hammer, had once served as a Soviet spy. $7

Another member of the ACUSR was Joseph Filner, president of Noblemet
International (later Newmet Corporation). Filner was extensively involved in
USSR-US tech transfers. Filner’s Noblemet created a joint venture for the purpose
of tech transfers, which was called Multi-Arc. By 1984, CDC’s Worldtech had
become “a worldwide marketing representative for Multi-Arc”+38

CDC would later recruit Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich after Perpich lost
his re-election campaign in 1979. Perpich, a dentist by training, would specifically
work for CDC overseas as “vice president and executive consultant to Control
Data Worldtech Inc”!32 The New York Times, reporting on his hire by CDC in
January 1979, stated that Perpich was expected to be based in Yugoslavia, but he
said he could find himself in Hungary, Bulgaria or Rumania [sic].’44° Robert
Maxwell was also intimately involved with tech transfers in Eastern Europe,
specifically in Bulgaria, which is discussed at the end of this chapter. Perpich, after
working for Worldtech, would win another term as Minnesota's governor in 1983.

CDC would also recruit another influential politician, Walter Mondale, who
was hired by CDC right after he left office as Jimmy Carter's vice president. CDC
hired Mondale as a legal consultant and retained his services for $2,000 per month
(about $6,360 in 2022 dollars).1+4 Simultaneously, Mondale was also a consultant
to Allen & Co, the company of the organized crime-linked Charles and Herbert
Allen mentioned throughout this book. Mondale was not only a consultant to, but
also a close friend of the Allen brothers. The Allen brothers also worked closely
with organized crime interests as well as Leslie Wexner’s “mentors” Max Fisher
and Alfred Taubman (discussed in detail in chapter 13). As previously mentioned
earlier in this chapter, Allen & Co. had a close business association with Earl Brian
and had financed one of his attempts to buy out Bill Hamilton's Inslaw.

By 1983, CDC was providing its services to the World Bank’s computer center
and, that same year, the PROMIS software was found to be in use at that specific

facility to keep track of wire transfers of money. This is according to a sworn
statement that Inslaw Inc. obtained from David McCallum in 1995. In 1983,
McCallum was working for CDC at the World Bank.

In my correspondence with Inslaw’s Bill Hamilton, he stated the following:
“According to an article in the International Banking Regulator dated January 17,
1994, U.S. Justice Department officials delivered the VAX version of PROMIS to
the World Bank in 1983. The World Bank, as an international institution, is
outside the reach of discovery of the U.S. courts. For its part, the World Bank
declares that it has been unable to find any evidence that it ever possessed the
VAX version of PROMIS”! Hamilton also relayed that he had once been
informed of a connection between CDC and PROMIS that involved the Deputy
Attorney General under Ed Meese, D. Lowell Jensen. However, he could no longer
remember the specifics of that connection.

As previously mentioned, among the connections Danny Casolaro revealed to
those close to him in the days and weeks before his death, he had specifically
mentioned the World Bank. There was talk specifically about money transfers
involving BCCI and the World Bank to individuals such as Earl Brian and Adnan
Khashoggi. Given that the documentation of those transfers mysteriously
disappeared from Casolaro’s hotel room at the time of his death, CDC’s apparent
involvement with the World Bank’s use of PROMIS takes on increased
significance.

Also significant is the role CDC played during the 1990 visit of Mikhail
Gorbachev, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, to the United States. During that
trip, Gorbachev visited CDC headquarters alongside Rudy Perpich as well as
Robert Maxwell. The Gorbachevs arrived in Minnesota immediately after a
summit meeting in Washington with then-President George HW. Bush.1“8
According to a report from the Minnesota Historical Society:

Gorbachev most likely agreed to the visit [Minnesota] because several Minnesota-based
corporations — especially the computer firm, Control Data Corporation — had long done
business in the Soviet Union. When the corporations officials learned that Gorbachev was
interested in a post-summit tour, they passed the word to Perpich, who had worked for Control
Data between his two terms as governor. Albert Eisele, who had been a consultant for Control
Data and, earlier, was Vice President Walter Mondale’s press secretary, drafted the governor’s
letter inviting the Gorbachevs. Former Control Data CEO Robert Price personally delivered the

letter to the Soviet embassy on February 26, 1990.144

During the visit, Gorbachev attended a lunch at the governor’s mansion,
where Robert Maxwell and Rudy Perpich joined groups of Soviet and American
officials. One of the American officials present was Condoleezza Rice, the future
Secretary of State who was then a National Security Council staff member.
Afterwards, there was a press conference where Robert Maxwell, in characteristic
bombastic fashion, “announced that he would donate $50 million to help create a
private research institution to be called the Gorbachev-Maxwell Institute of
Technology.’ Maxwell said that the donation was “contingent on Perpich raising
matching funds? 14

After visiting Minnesota, Gorbachev next visited Silicon Valley, where he
spent the week “trying to perfect the art of winning acceptance and investment
from the captains of capitalism? A Washington Post article on his visit quoted John
Sculley, then-head of Apple Computers as saying, “I think Gorbachev got to us...
We'll all be thinking about business with the Soviet Union in a way we wouldn't

have if he hadn’t come.“

The institute was never launched.

MAXWELL AND MULTI-GROUP

obert Maxwell's involvement in intelligence-linked technology transfers was

considerable and went far beyond his tangential involvement with Control
Data Corporation, as detailed above. The most important of these involved
Maxwell's relationship with Bulgarian intelligence and his role in an operation
known as “Neva.”

Maxwell had long been interested in Bulgaria, even before he was first brought
into Mossad’s fold in the early 1960s. In one of his earliest meetings with Vladimir
Kryuchkov, the KGB chief and one of the most powerful of Maxwell’s “sources,”
Maxwell had “raised the possibility that Bulgaria might be a country where he
could invest his money away from prying eyes in the City of London and Wall
Street.” Kryuchkov later granted him permission to establish a “financial bunker in
the Bulgarian capital, Sofia” Maxwell, years later and after he established a close
relationship with Bulgarian leadership and the top figures in its intelligence
service, would go on to sell the bugged PROMIS software to Bulgarian
intelligence, the proceeds of which were laundered and eventually made available

to finance Mossad’s “black” operations.1“8

Out of Maxwell’s associations with Bulgarian intelligence came a program
called Neva. Neva, per Gordon Thomas, was “designed to be the single largest
program for the mass-scale theft of US technology” and sought to “plunder every
Western industrialized nation”! The program was operated by Bulgarian
intelligence, whose agents would steal technology and bring it into Bulgaria,
“usually under diplomatic cover”? Bulgarian companies owned by Maxwell
would then re-engineer the stolen equipment and then those companies would
resell those products to other Eastern bloc countries.

One of the men who developed Neva alongside Maxwell, Ognian Doinov,
president of the Bulgarian Chamber for Industry and Trade from 1980 to 1984
and Bulgarias Vice Premier from 1984 to 1986, claimed that Bulgarian
intelligence agents involved in Neva had been covertly working “in Silicon Valley
and other key technology centers” in the United States, as well as in Britain and
other Western countries. There, they would steal “technology blueprints, actual
software, even computers” 151

According to Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell created an umbrella of
companies for use in Neva within six months. Thanks to Maxwell, Thomas writes,
“The country had become [...] the center of a thriving economy based upon
whole-scale theft and money laundering.” This growing business empire, Thomas
asserts would later “grow into one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the
world, embracing the Russian Mafia, the crime families of Bulgaria and, far away
across the Atlantic, those in New York and, on the other side of the world, the
crime families of Japan and Hong Kong”)

The beginnings of this crime syndicate can be found in the umbrella
corporation that would combine the companies Maxwell had created to operate
Neva — Multi-Group. Multi-Group would go on to “control a significant
percentage of the global profits from gas, telecommunications, oil, gambling, and
money laundering.” It would later emerge that Neva companies, many of which
were now part of Multi-Group, were used as cover by Mossad with Maxwell’s
blessing.*>*

John Patrick O'Neill, FBI executive agent-in-charge in New York until 2001,
would later say the following about Maxwell and Multi-Group:

In many ways Maxwell was at the heart of the global criminal network. Beginning with his

Bulgarian connection he showed how to structure a network that grew into financially powerful
criminal corporations whose power would extend to the South American drug cartels, the

Tongs and the Triads, the Russian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. They were all there before.

But the way Robert Maxwell set up things up, they would all come together in Multi-Group in

its early years. His last contribution was not that he just robbed his pension funds. It was that he
155

was the man who set in motion a true coalition of global criminals. =>>

Another Maxwell company that was based in the US has been suspected of
playing some role in the Neva program. In 1985, Maxwell created Pergamon-
Brassey, registering the company in McLean, Virginia. He and his son Kevin were
listed as directors. Two years later, in 1987, the company underwent a major
shake-up and former Senator John Tower, who had been a major accomplice of
Maxwell’s in the PROMIS scandal, became chairman of its board. Prominent
former generals of the US and British militaries were also added to the company’s
board.

According to Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Inc., Pergamon-Brassey seemed to have
more connections to PROMIS aside from Robert Maxwell and John Tower:

In 1987, Pergamon-Brassey hired two senior computer-systems executives who resigned at the
same time from the Meese Justice Department’s Justice Data Center. The proprietary IBM
mainframe version of PROMIS had been operating at the Justice Data Center since the early
eighties. George Vaveris resigned his estimated $90,000 a year Senior Executive Service position
as director of the Justice Data Center to become vice-president for technical services at the tiny
Pergamon-Brassey. He told a colleague at the Justice Department his new salary would be in

excess of $200,000 a year. 157

Pergamon-Brassey was a specialist company, with no more than six employees
on its payroll at any given time. While it did publish books on topics related to
national security and intelligence, it primarily dealt with software; software that

some suspect may have been part of Maxwells sprawling, Neva-related

operations. +8

A year after Pergamon-Brassey was revamped and Tower installed as its
chairman, Maxwell became involved with the notorious Russian mobster Semion
Mogilevich. Mogilevich was part of a plan that had been pitched to Maxwell and
designed by Vladimir Kryuchkov. Gordon Thomas relays that plan as follows:

Even more fearful at the pace at which perestroika was accelerating, Kryuchkov said that for the
KGB to remain a potent force he wanted to establish “over six hundred commercial enterprises.”
They would all have links to the West. Just as Maxwell’s companies provided cover for Mossad’s
katsas, Kryuchkov envisaged his companies would provide similar protection for KGB
operatives. [... ]

The six hundred companies would each employ a quota of senior party members to provide
them with an income during the difficult days ahead in the transition from Communism to

capitalism. Through genuine trading links, the companies would obtain access to the very heart
of capitalism: Wall Street and the City of London and the Bourses of Western Europe. Its staffs
would then learn the innermost secrets of the West’s banking system, the well-spring of all
capitalism. Eventually it might even be possible to destabilise Western economies — and pave the

way for the return of Communism. +52

The year he met Maxwell, in 1988, Mogilevich was granted an Israeli passport
thanks to Maxwell’s lobbying of Israel's government on his behalf. With this
passport, Mogilevich soon established a web of seemingly legitimate companies in
Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom which were used to launder his
illicit profits from his considerable involvement in weapons deals, drug trafficking,
and human trafficking. A year after meeting Maxwell, Mogilevich’s criminal profits
grew considerably, reaching an estimated $40 billion annually+©

Maxwell subsequently became a business partner of Mogilevich’s as well as
Ivo Janchev, a Bulgarian intelligence officer linked up with Mogilevich and other
organized crime figures in the Eastern bloc. Janchev was also allegedly a part of
Kryuchkov’s plan and was tasked with acting as “the front man to make contact
with several Russians with businesses in the West.”

Maxwell would ultimately play a crucial role in allowing these organized crime
interests to enter into the world of “respectable” international finance. It is
unknown if anything ever resulted from Kryuchkov’s plan, but Maxwell's
connections to Mogilevich, Janchev, and other unsavory characters would
undeniably have a considerable impact on the expansion of the mobsters’
legitimate and illegitimate businesses and foster the expansion of the “global
criminal network” that Maxwell had helped spawn through Multi-Group.

FROM COLD WARS TO HOT MONEY

ccording to Tom Bower’s biography of Maxwell, the tycoon spent a

considerable amount of time in Moscow in 1991. There, he was negotiating
the purchase of approximately $1 billion worth of gold+® The sellers were
reportedly KGB officers, and the outcome of the exchange has been shrouded in
secrecy. Per the account in Bower's book, Maxwell went to Moscow to secure the
gold, only to discover that it had been “lost.”4®2 Other versions of the tale suggest
that Maxwell wasn’t acting alone, and that he was once again operating in tandem
with the Mossad. According to this account, the gold actually found its way to

Israel — not an uncommon destination for assets that had flowed out of the
Eastern bloc during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Throughout 1991, stories of massive outflows of Soviet gold circulated about,
with many naming sums considerably higher than the $1 billion that Maxwell was
purportedly seeking to acquire. In spring of that year, a report appeared in the
Manchester Guardian that a “‘package’ worth $12 billion” was moved from the
USSR outside of “normal export channels.”4“ Several months later Grigori
Yavlinski, the Russian economist tapped by Gorbachev to help oversee Soviet
economic reforms, told stunned world leaders at a G-7 summit that Russia's gold
reserves had dwindled from 2,000-3,000 tons to 240 tons.4°5 Even before the
Soviet Union collapsed, looting was taking place on a colossal scale.

According to Claire Sterling's book Thieves World, an army of strange and
dubious figures descended upon Europe in 1991, offering to sell off massive
amounts of Russian gold. One of these figures, subsequently well-known in
conspiracy circles for his questionable claims, was an American mob-linked
conman named Leo Wanta. In league with several mafioso and other “faceless
investors,’ Wanta blanketed trading houses across the globe “with faxed offers to
sell two thousand tons of gold.”1°° At the same time, Roberto Coppola, an Italian
boasting credentials identifying him as a member of the Knights of Malta, was
likewise trying to sell off the exact same amount of gold. According to a source for

0

Sterling that she refers to only as “Mr. X,” “Roberto Coppola was the source of all
the gold that Wanta was offering” 167

Were there any links between the Wanta-Coppola gold sales and Maxwell's
attempts to buy up Soviet gold? One tantalizing possibility can be found in the
ATLAS dossier, discussed in chapter 7, which outlined a criminal network
connected to the corrupt Belgian-Costa Rican diplomat Felix Przedborski. The
dossier names an American company called New Republic as one of the vehicles
through which Przedborski’s group laundered money, mostly profits accrued
through arms and drug trafficking.+°? Documents reproduced by Sterling in her
book show that Wanta was offering the gold through his US-based company, New
Republic/USA Financial Group, Ltd1+@

There were a number of ties, albeit links one or two steps removed, between
Przedborski’s group and Maxwell’s network. There is the fact, for instance, that
Bruce Rappaport called upon the legal resources of a law office where

Przedborski’s son was a partner. Rappaport and Maxwell had a number of mutual

associates that included attorney Samuel Pisar, banker Edmond Safra, and Russian
mobster Simeon Mogilevich. Along similar lines, the ATLAS dossier identified
Safra’s Republic National Bank as one of its money laundering outlets. There was
also the reason the dossier had been drafted in the first place: the looting-induced
collapse of a company called Comuele S.A. by the associate of the Przedborski
group. According to the dossier, Comuele had been taken over by “Russians,” and
injected with money from Israel. During the 1980s, Comuele was owned by
Lonrho, the corporate flagship of Maxwell’s friend Tiny Rowland.“

Throughout the later period of the Cold War, the intelligence services of the
Eastern bloc established trading companies and corporate fronts, often obscured
behind walls of ownership, through which they could simultaneously conduct
espionage operations and obtain hard currency for cash-starved states. East
Germany’s KoKo was one example, as was Kintex in Bulgaria (which Maxwell
certainly would have done business with).

These and entities like Bulgaria's Multi-Group subsequently became the
conduits through which capital flowed out of the Eastern bloc as the Soviet Union
buckled and collapsed. Maxwell’s role in Multi-Group shows his direct
involvement in these activities. As discussed earlier in this chapter, Maxwell had
struck a deal with KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov to help manage the secret
service's economic fronts in Europe and elsewhere The 1991 gold deals likely
arose from precisely these sorts of strategic alignments.

Another KGB front that became a vehicle for capital flight that was tied to the
Maxwell family was Nordex, based in Vienna and launched with the ostensible
purpose of exporting fertilizer. The full details of the relationship between Nordex
and the Maxwells will be discussed in chapter 16, but for now it is enough to
mention that the firm's founder, Grigori Loutchansky, had been a rising star in the
Latvian Communist Party under the sponsorship of Boris Pugo, the soon-to-be
chairman of the Latvian section of the KGB.1% Perhaps importantly, Pugo had
been closely tied to KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, who — according to Gordon
Thomas — was the one who reached out to Maxwell concerning corporate cover
for Soviet economic espionage operations.

After a stint in prison for theft, Loutchansky landed a job as the fertilizer
exporter for Adahzi, a state-owned import-export company. In 1989, after a year at
Adahzi, he launched Nordex, which soon boasted numerous subsidiaries; these
were dedicated to shipping and freight transport and were organized along with

joint ventures with late Soviet companies. Soon Nordex was swimming in the
world of offshore finance, with “multi-million dollar transfers with obscure
companies, incorporated in tax havens such as Ireland, Lichtenstein, and the Isle
of Man” making up a significant chunk of its shadowy business activity. It also
indulged in global black market trades. According to intelligence sources cited by
Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Nordex was deeply “involved in arms, drugs, the
whole nine yards.”12° This also entailed the trade of nuclear materials such as
uranium, plutonium, and beryllium.

Reports in the Swiss press identify Nordex’s co-founder as none other than
Marc Rich, an allegation reiterated in US government documents. Bruce
Raphael writes in his book King Energy, that Rich utilized Nordex to snap up
Russian oil refineries that were being auctioned off during the post-Soviet

economic transition.128

Yet another player in Nordex was the Swiss attorney Iso
Lenzlinger, known for his status as a “financial juggler” who had “sat on over 100
boards of directors” and spent time as the secretary of Zug, Switzerland's official
trade association+ According to press reports, “Lenzlinger maintained
connections with western and eastern secret service agents”18 One of his clients
had been Guenther Forgber, the Stasi's front-man in running the West German
trading company KoKo."®! In a set of circumstances reminiscent of Control Data
Corporation's Eastern bloc activities, Forgber was involved in the acquisition and
transfer of high technology from the West.182

During the 1990s, Nordex’s money laundering activities linked it with a
company, registered in New Jersey and active in New York City and London,
called Benex International Co., Inc. Benex’s offices, located in the New York
borough of Queens, “shared the same building with two companies connected to

Loutchansky.’+*8 Authorities investigating Russian mob-linked money
laundering activities also found the fingerprints of Marc Rich at Benex. Wire
transfers were discovered between Benex and “Glencore of Rich’—though the
transactions took place after Rich had departed from Glencore** Both Rich and
Glencore denied that they had done any sort of business with Benex.

The most glaring connections between Nordex and Benex were found in
Europe. During the mid-1990s, Benex moved as much as $9 billion through a
handful of companies in Paris, all of which shared the same office. The most
important of these was Kama France, controlled by brothers Igor and Oleg

Berezovsky (whether they were related to the better-known Russian oligarch Boris

Berezovsky is unknown) and owned by a Swiss company called Kama Trade AG.
Italian investigators found that Kama Trade was “said to be a member of the
Nordex group of companies.”48° One of Kama’s “substantial shareholders” was a
man named Andreas Marissov, a director and shareholder in another firm called

IFS Fracht-Service—a subsidiary of Nordex.+®° Finally, Kama Trade was managed

by Lenzlinger & Partners, a trust headed by the aforementioned Iso Lenzlinger.*87

Benex also arose in investigations into the financial activities of Maxwell’s
most notorious criminal associate, Simeon Mogilevich. Money had been moved
through bank accounts held by Benex to YBM Magnex International, a
Pennsylvania company that had merged with a large Hungarian firm “that sold
industrial magnets and military hardware.”/88 YBM was firmly under the control
of Mogilevich, and had been capitalized with funds from Arigon Ltd., the “heart
of his criminal empire” 182 Within four years of its launch, YBM grew to a billion
dollar company, and embarked on an ambitious plan to use the Canadian stock
market as a means of money laundering via a publicly-traded shell company. That
effort, however, was unsuccessful.

Benex was just one part of a vast and much more complicated money
laundering network that encompassed Mogilevich and a number of Russian
oligarchs as well as newly-minted private banks operating in the wildly
unregulated markets of the former Soviet Union. The company had been formed
by Peter Berlin and his wife, Lucy Edwards, an officer in the Eastern European
Division of Bank of New York (BONY).

When Benex moved hot money on behalf of Nordex and Mogilevich, it was
using accounts the pair had set up at the bank, and at their offices in Queens.
Berlin and Edwards had installed BONY’s wire-transfer technology, Micro/Ca$h-
Register, on their computers. When the pair were finally busted for money
laundering activities, Edwards confessed that she had been working under the
assumption that what they had been doing was “consistent with the practice of
[BONY’s] Eastern European Division” +22

A lawsuit brought against BONY in the Southern District Court of New York
disclosed that BONY executives were themselves close to Mogilevich. The head of
the bank’s Eastern European Division, Natasha Gurfinkel, was revealed to “have
contacts with Mogilevich’ via her husband, Konstantin Kagalovsky. Interestingly,
Konstantin, a former Soviet economist, was Russia's representative to the IMF
from 1992 through 1995, and was very close with the teams carrying out the

privatization of former state-owned enterprises.“ According to the suit, BONY’s
security personnel contacted the bank’s chairman and CEO, Thomas Renyi,
concerning these ties. “Renyi,” reads the legal complaint, “‘interviewed’ Gurfinkel
about the matter, and no action was taken? 122

BONY’s connection to the former Eastern bloc arose from the close
relationship between the bank and Bruce Rappaport. Between 1989 and 1990,
BONY purchased the stake held in Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank (IMB) by
BCCI front-men, leading IMB to be rechristened as Bank of New York-Inter
Maritime Bank (BONY-IMB).% Immediately following this restructuring,
Rappaport went about increasing his business in the Soviet Union. In August
1990, Rappaport met with Gorbachev in Moscow to discuss a series of joint
ventures between the Inter Maritime complex and Soviet state-owned enterprises.
Curiously, this meeting took place just one month after the encounter between
Gorbachev and Maxwell in Minnesota.

Soon, a number of joint ventures were announced. Most involved
collaborations with Soviet shipbuilding enterprises, which were set up to boost
the Eastern bloc’s export capacities. Others were to be dedicated to port
construction, cruise lines, and to oil and gas exploration in Siberia. With Paul
Helliwell’s old banking partner Burton Kanter working hard on the legal
dimensions, IMB-BONY fostered ties to a number of Soviet-controlled banking
entities. Correspondent banking relations were set up between a handful of joint-
stock banks and IMB-BONY, which only increased in number when the Soviet
Union relaxed laws restricting private banking enterprises.

This became the backbone of BONY’s push eastward. The Eastern European
Division was established and Gurfinkel was installed as its head. Soon, she was
“working closely with BONY-IMB personnel” and meeting personally with a
number of “banking executives throughout Russia and Eastern Europe”? She
put the Micro Ca$h-Register technology on display, and illustrated to interested
parties how it could “route US dollar denominated currency to a web of offshore
banking entities’”!2° Just as BONY-IMB had done before, BONY began to
accumulate a vast number of Russian correspondent banks.

One particularly interesting bank that BONY and BONY-IMB were tied to
was the European Union Bank (EUB), which had been named as a money
laundromat used by Russian organized crime figures. With operations set up in
Antigua, EUB had been established by Alexander Konanykhine, who just a few

years prior had organized the All-Russian Exchange Bank (AREB) at the behest of
the KGB. Through AREB, Konanykhine “aided and abetted the movement of
approximately $300 million [or up to] $1 billion, to the West, from November
1991 through May 199212? When Konanykhine turned his attention to Antigua,
BONY and BONY-IMB weren't the only Rappaport-linked entities that he did
business with. EUB also maintained ties to Rappaport’s own Antiguan bank,
Swiss-American, which he had set up with Burton Kanter and Marvin Warner —
the close friend and business partner of Edward DeBartolo. As will be noted in
chapter 13, Edward DeBartolo was not only a close business associate of Leslie
Wexner, but also a major associate of organized crime.

BONY’s Eastern European banking activities took on sophisticated
technological dimensions. Besides Micro Ca$h-Register, the bank took steps to
develop what it called “cyphergrams,’ an encrypted communication system to
allow for more direct interactions between BONY, its correspondent banks, and
the offshore network of banks and businesses that they used to move money.+2®
Similarly, databases were developed that provided code-names for the
participants, tabulated ownership shares in offshore entities, and tracked money
dispersal. This and the other systems were marketed to various Russian banks in
BONY’ client list.

Both the cyphergrams and the database systems were part of an effort to help
develop a technique created by Gurfinkel, the manager of Inkombank (one of
BONY ’s largest Russian banking clients), and a mysterious individual named Bob
Klein, called “prokutki’, or “spinning around.” As the Southern District of New
York suit against BONY described it, “spinning around” was an elaborate means of
laundering money around the world:

After a major “investment” was placed by a Russian customer with Inkombank or one of its
satellite offshore companies, BONY would execute a series of electronic funds transfers (EFTs)
from the Inkombank U.S. dollar accounts to specific offshore front companies and bank
accounts. Usually, several layers of these electronic funds transfers to offshore entities were
executed in succession, hence the name “spinning around.’ The ultimate goal of the “spinning
around” scheme was to obscure and disguise the true origin of the funds being moved through
the BONY accounts. The “spinning around” scheme allowed Inkombank’s customer to evade
payment of Russian taxes and duties, and provided the ability to launder proceeds from illegal
acts. The conspirators generated “commission” payments, or “skim,’ based on a percentage of
the total amount of money moved through the network out of Russia. The commissions, also
referred to as “consulting fees,’ were ultimately diverted for the benefit of the conspirators

through BONY to offshore entities +22

To make matters even more complicated, the existence of Bob Klein himself
remains an open question. In various legal declarations and investigations, he has
been described as “a close associate and representative of both Rappaport and
[BONY chairman Thomas] Renyi.”22° Two BONY employees testified under oath
that they had met Klein, but neither any BONY-IMB office logs nor BONY
internal paperwork ever mentioned his name.

Alan Block and Constance Weaver, authors of the most definitive work on
Rappaport and his decades of corruption, concluded that Klein was something of
a fiction deployed to obscure the inner-workings of BONY’s criminal activities.
“We ... have met the man who invented Klein,” they write. While they don't name
this individual, they do pass along the ominous statement that he gave them:
“How can we ever know who someone really is in any case — Passports can be
faked — Records can be forged — How can we really know?”?%

This financial maze came crumbling down in August 1998, thanks to an
untimely intervention by a surprising party: Republic National Bank (RNB), the
bank controlled by Maxwell's close friend Edmond Safra. RNB drafted a
“suspicious activities report” and turned it over to the treasuries, outlining
evidence of strange transactions between RNB, BONY, and a handful of
companies — including Benex.222 On August 5*®, Lewis Shiliro at the Justice
Department sent a letter to Dov Schlein, chairman of RNB, thanking him for the
bank’s report. In the letter, Shiliro wrote that RNB had assisted “the New York
Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an ongoing major money
laundering investigation ”?23

Suspicions have been raised about the supposed altruism of RNB, a bank that,
as discussed in other chapters, was linked to Iran-Contra, Colombian cartel
money laundering, the Przedborski group, and drug traffickers operating in the
Middle East. Indeed, Block and Weaver write that RNB “had been obnoxiously
crooked for some time,’ and may have taken “the ‘high road’ in order to protect
itself”2°* In order words, RNB was getting out ahead of an FBI probe that might
have exposed whatever banking affairs it was indulging in with BONY and its
affiliates.

RNB itself had a long history of involvement with both Russian organized
crime figures and with the troubled Russian economy in the years that followed
the end of the Cold War. It held accounts, for example, used by Shabtai
Kalmanovitch, a “Russian-Israeli entrepreneur” and insider to the world of the

Russian-American mob operating from Brighton Beach.22° Kalmanovitch brought
with him, unsurprisingly, ties to the world of intelligence services. During the
height of the Cold War, he was tied closely to the KGB and Mossad, and like
Maxwell appears to have served as a back-channel between them and other
intelligence agencies.2°° There have other been allegations that Kalmanovitch had
served as a point of contact for Jonathan Pollard, the infamous Israeli spy
operating within the US intelligence community.2~%

At the beginning of 1992, the US Federal Reserve began an ambitious project
of injecting money into Russia by selling dollars to its leading banks. RNB was the
Fed’s principal agent in these transactions, which saw RNB obtaining dollars from
the central bank, which would then be transported by courier to Russia to be sold.
The sum of these dollars was soon in excess of $80 billion, far outstripping “the
value of all the Russian rubles in circulation.”2°8 While the ostensible goal of the
Federal Reserve was to preserve the beleaguered Russian banking industry, the
flood of dollars was a boon for organized crime. Many of the banks that were on
the receiving end of the trade were controlled by criminal enterprises, and not an
insignificant portion of these funds was being funnelled into offshore zones by
laundering webs like the one operated by BONY.

With the dollar flows leaving Russia at a rapid rate, and the general problem of
large-scale capital flight, Russia was teetering on the brink of crisis by 1998. These
factors were compounded by the Asian financial crisis, which led to a global dip in
the supply of oil and other mineral resources and caused a decline in exports. At
its climax, Russia faced a run on its banks. In response, the IMF put in motion an
emergency “stabilization credit” for Russia valued at $11.2 billion, $4.8 billion of
which was made immediately available to the country’s central bank.22? Yet within
a month, the Russian financial crisis had set in, and RNB was alerting authorities
about suspicious transactions. The reason for the former, and almost certainly the
latter, was that the IMF credits had vanished into the financial void.

Following a forensic analysis of the complex webs of transfers involving the
$4.8 billion credit, Russia’s prosecutor-general, Yury Skuratov, announced that the
lions share of the funds had gone to commercial banks, who then used their
correspondent banking relations to siphon the money back out of Russia.2/2
Aiding and abetting this theft, he continued, was BONY. Meanwhile, in
Czechoslovakia, investigators began tracing transactions between BONY and
Komercini Bank. They were “certain these transactions were a part of the money-

laundering operation of IMF funds”?} Soon, independent investigations into

BONY and the IMF credit were underway in financial centers from London to
Zurich.

BONY was not the lone recipient of the money. The Russian Ministry of
Finance charged that portions of the money had flowed into an account held at
RNB that was used to “sell currency on foreign exchanges” According to the
Russian paper Novaya Gazeta, Edmond Safra was spooked by the financial crisis
that had ensued, and began turning evidence over to the FBI. This timing here
certainly overlaps with that of RNB blowing the whistle on BONY, while Safra
was reported to have had “periodic conversations with FBI representatives [that]
lasted almost a year”

Oleg Lurye, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, subsequently reported that in fall
of 1999, Safra was visited at his French estate by the Russian oligarch Boris
Berezovsky, one of Russia's wealthiest individuals and a part of Boris Yeltsin's inner
circle. Numerous press reports show that, by August of that year, the probes into
BONY’s money laundering had ensnared Berezovsky.24* According to Lurye,
Safra and Berezovsky had an increas ingly angry conversation that lasted several
hours, “after which Safra fled in panic to his heavily fortified Monte Carlo
residence.”245

Several months later, at the beginning December, Safra was dead. The official
cause of death was suffocation from a fire in his Monte Carlo estate that had been
caused by exceedingly bizarre circumstances. His bodyguards — many of whom
were veterans of Mossad — were not present that night.2/° In early reports, “two
hooded intruders” entered Safra’s residences. They were fought off by one of
Safra’s nurses (and former Green Beret), Ted Maher, although he was stabbed in
the process. Maher then ushered Safra and his fellow nurse, Vivian Torrente,
into a secure room, and proceeded to attempt to alert the authorities through,
oddly enough, the only means at his disposal: starting a fire in a waste basket to set
off the fire alarms. For whatever reason, it took the fire department and the police
two and half hours to arrive on the scene. By the time they arrived, Safra and
Torrente had already succumbed to the fire’s fames.%8

The story very quickly changed. In the end, the court found that Maher
himself was to blame. As the story goes, the military veteran had hoped to impress
Safra by staging the attack and setting the fire. To make it seem more realistic, he

had stabbed himself. Once in court, stories swirled that Maher was troubled and

that his behavior had become increasingly erratic and lawyers speculated this was
linked to a family history of schizophrenia. “[W]e can exclude with certainty all
[conjectures] of any international conspiracy,’ declared the Safra family attorney,
before adding that “The fact that Maher is unstable became apparent to us only
after the accident”*12 Others were not convinced. According to Vanity Fair
journalist Dominick Dunne, an associate of the Safra family told him that “Among
friends, we avoid talking about it. It might not be what it js.”220

What really happened that night in Monaco will likely never be known.
However, Safras fate closely parallels the murky death of his friend, Robert
Maxwell, nearly a decade prior, amid a similar whirlwind of strange transactions
and Eastern European intrigue. While other giants moving in these same shadows
— like Bruce Rappaport — managed to slip away, the deaths of Maxwell and Safra
are something like bookends to the 1990s, the decade when the US and its allies
emerged victorious from the Cold War and everything belonging to the defeated
went up for sale.

Endnotes

11
12

13
14

15
16
17
18
19

20
21

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul, 1st Carroll & Graf ed (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 40-41,

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret
Government, ePub (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2016), 12.

Stephen Buranyi, “Is the Staggeringly Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for
Science?,” The Guardian, June 27, 2017,

publishing-bad-for-science.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 41.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 51.

Leslie Wayne, “Socialist Millionaire: Robert Maxwell; Fighting to Be the Tabloid King on
London's Fleet Street,’ New York Times, November 11, 1984,
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/11/business/socialist-millionaire-robert-maxwell-
fighting-be-tabloid-king-london-s-fleet.html.

November 6, 1991, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1991/nov/06/obituaries.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 41.

Robert Friedman, “The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World,” The Village Voice, May 26,
1998, https://www.villagevoice.com/1998/05/26/the-most-dangerous-mobster-in-the-
world/.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 37.

Barker and Sylvester, “Maxwell Obituary.”

“Paper Breaks Taboo on Shamir, Nazi Link : Jerusalem Post Cites Stern Gang Past, Hits Stance
on Peace Now,’ Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1989, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1989-03-07-mn-330-story.html; “Yitzhak Shamir: The Well-Liked Terrorist,’ Consortium News,
July 2, 2012, https://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/02/yitzhak-shamir-the-well-liked-
terrorist/.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 35.

Philip Giraldi, “The Truth of Jonathan Pollard,” The American Conservative, December 2, 2015,
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-truth-of-jonathan-pollard/.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 54.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 58.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 60.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 63.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 65; Richard L. Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus,’ Wired,
January 1, 1993, https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/.

IThomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 65

Emma North-Best, “The Undying Octopus: FBI and the PROMIS Affair Part 1,” MuckRock, May

22

23
24
25
26

27
28
29

30
31
32
33

34
35
36
37
38

39

40

41
42
43
44

45

46

Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, 4th ed (New York: Thomas
Dunne, 2007), 197-98, https://archive.org/details/gideonsspiessecrO0Othom.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 67.
Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus.”
Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus.”

“INSLAW’S Analysis and Rebuttal of the BUA Report,’
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/law/rebuttal.txt.

Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus.”
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 68.

Alison Leigh Cowan, “Wall Street; Israeli Stocks’ Post-Shamir Rally,’ New York Times, July 19,
1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/19/business/wall-street-israeli-stocks-post-
shamirrally.html.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 36-7.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 36-7.
Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 81.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 92.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 90.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 92.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 54-55.

“Letter to the Director of the FBI, SUBJECT: Robert Maxwell,” FBI Documents obtained by
INSLAW through FOIA, p. 13-15, https://unlimitedhangout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2022/05/FBilnvestigationMaxwellPROMISSales.pdf.

“Letter to CIA Director William Casey,’ Pergamon International Information Corporation,
September 6, 1983, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP85B01152R000600710072-7.pdf.

Emma North-Best, “Sir Robert Maxwell's FBI File Is Getting More Classified by the Minute,’
MuckRock, June 28, 2017, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jun/28/sir-
robert-maxwells-fbi-PROMIS/.

North-Best, “Sir Robert Maxwell's FBI File.’
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 96.
North-Best, “Sir Robert Maxwell's FBI File”
“Christine Maxwell Resume,’

Christine Maxwell-CV_2013Feb.pdf.

Mary Sagi-Maydan and Yehoshua Sagi, “Comfortable in Her Skin,’ Haaretz, February 13,
2002, https://www.haaretz.com/2002-02-13/ty-article/comfortable-in-her-skin/000001 7f-
f6fb-d5bd-a1 7f-f6fb5de60000.

Emma North-Best, “Memo Shows the CIA Was Offered PROMIS Software in 1981,’ Muck-
Rock, December 18, 2018, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/dec/18/promis-
81-memo/.

47

48
49

50
51
52

53
54

55
56

57
58
59

60
61
62
63

64

65

66

67

68
69
70
71

Cheri Seymour, The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the
PROMIS Software Scandal, 1st ed (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2010), 38, 41.

Seymour, Last Circle, 38-39.

software-and-the-murders-to-cover-up-a-scandal-bigger-than-watergate.html.

Kesel, “Promise.”

Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus.”

Scott Horton, “Main Core’: The Last Round-Up: Sidney Blumenthal on the Origins of the
Republican Party, the Fallout from Clinton’s Emails, and His New Biography of Abraham
Lincoln,” Harper’s Magazine, May 21, 2008, https://harpers.org/2008/05/main-core-the-last-
round-up/.

Fricker, “The INSLAW Octopus.”

“Context of ‘1980s: Oliver North Uses PROMIS Software to Track Dissidents,” History
Commons,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170626063208/www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?
item=northpromis80.

Horton, “Main Core’: The Last Round-Up.”

https://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/.

Shorrock, “Exposing.”

Shorrock, “Exposing.”

MintPress News, September 6, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-
jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/.

Webb, “The CIA.”

Webb, “The CIA.”

Seymour, Last Circle, 52.

Elliot L. Richardson, “Letter to Kenneth Starr,’ February 7, 1995,
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/kavanaugh/releases/docid-70105136.pdf.

Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt
Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 40.

James R. Norman, The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century, 1st ed (Oregon:
Trine Day, 2008), 101.

Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the

James Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 3, Media Bypass Magazine, August 1995,
https://archive.org/details/VinceFoster-NSA-Banking-Transactions-Spying,

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 3.
Richardson, “Letter to Starr.”
Richardson, “Letter to Starr.”
Richardson, “Letter to Starr.”

72
73
74

75
76
77
78
79
80

81
82

83
84

85
86

87
88
89
90

91
92

93

94

Seymour, Last Circle, 272.

Richardson, “Letter to Starr.”

Casolaro's Death Through 2017,” MuckRock, May 20, 2018,
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/may/20/casolaro-update/.
Richardson, “Letter to Starr.”

Normal, The Oil Card, 101.

Norman, “Fostergate,” Document 1, 6.

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 28.

“2 Military Chiefs Join Wackenhut,’ Fort Lauderdale News, November 5, 1971.
histories/e-systems-inc-history/.

“E-Systems Inc. History”

John Mintz, “The Secret's Out: Covert E-Systems Inc. Covets Commercial Sales,’ Washington

secrets-out-covert-e-systems-inc-covets-commercial-sales/3deadc17-4bd2-41bd-b607-
9fa493458fb8/.

Mintz, “The Secret's Out.’

Mintz, “The Secret's Out.” On Air Asia and the CIA, see Alan Axelrod, Mercenaries: A Guide to
Private Armies and Private Military Companies (SAGE Publications, 2013), 142-43.

“CIA front company sold for less than network worth,’ Des Moines Register, July 13, 1977.
Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central
America (University of California Press), 37-8.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 38.

Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 88.

Thomas J. Farer, Transnational Crime in the America (Routledge, 1999), 195.

Jim Fuquay, “Fort Worth group tried to buy planes for Libya,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
December 7, 1980.

Fuquay, “Fort Worth group tied to buy planes for Libya.’

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair: Depositions,
Appendix B, Volume 3, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, 1988, 176,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of the Congressional Committees I/u1 -
pOKeFe8sC.

Geoff Goodall, “Warbirds Directory, Version 6: Lockheed,”

In 1993, T & G sold two aircraft to a Mexican aviation company called Aero Postal, which was
subsequently discovered to have been flying cocaine into the US on behalf of the “Tijuana-
based cartel of the Arellano Felix Family.’ T & G’s sale to Aero Postal had been “financed by a
Mexican bank, which was assured of repayment by the Export-Import Bank of the United
States.” These planes had first been acquired by the Arizona aviation company from Valley
National Bank of Arizona, a firm that was also providing loans to Charles Keating’s American
Continental Corporation. Ari Ben-Menashe alleges that he had been instructed on behalf of
his Israeli intelligence handlers to deposit $4 million into an account at Valley National Bank

95

96
97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104
105

belonging to Earl Brian, as part of the October Surprise pay-offs. Ben-Menashe notes that he
suspected that the source of these funds was “drug profit money from Central America”

For T & G sale to Aero Postal, see “Arizona Firm Sold Military Plane to Cartel-Linked
Carrier,’ San Diego Source, April 15, 1998.

On T &G, Aero Postal and Valley National Bank, see Review of the U.S. Forest Service
Firefighting Aircraft Program Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Specialty Crops and Natural
Resources of the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third
Congress, First Session, August 5, 1993, 74,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Review_of the U S Forest Service Firefig/ a0eA
AAAMAAJ.

On Valley National Bank and Charles Keating, see Investigation of Lincoln Savings & Loan
Association, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of
Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, 781,
bmeqMC.

On Ari Ben-Menashe”’s allegations, see Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the US-
Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square Press, 1992), 77.

Del E. Webb, the organized crime-linked Arizona developer who shaped Las Vegas, had
close ties to Valley National Bank, and had even sat on the bank's board of directors. Judith
Nies, Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West (Public Affairs, 2014), 15.

As discussed in chapter 8, a former Webb employee, Leonard Lavoie, had set up a
company called Systems Marketing that leased a Beechcraft King Air that ended up in the
hands of Barry Seal.

On the transfers between Ransom’s group and Ford & Vlahos, see Goodal, “Warbirds
Directory.’ On John Ford and T & G Aviation, see “Ford & Vlahos v. ITT Commercial Finance
Corp,’ Court of Appeals, First District, Division 4, California, December 20, 1993,
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1848036.html; and “Gary R, Eitel V. Roy D.
Reagan (Declaration),’ US District Court of Oregon,

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eitel_ vs Reagan (declaration).

“Gary R. Eitel V. Roy D. Reagan (Declaration).

On the transfers to Aboitiz concernse, see Goodall, “Warbirds Directory”. On the Aboitiz
family and Marcos, see Albert F. Celoza, Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines: The Political
Economy of Authoritarianism (Praeger, 1997), 96.

“Aerial Drug Smuggling Broken,” Washington Post, June 30, 1994,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/06/30/aerial-drug-smuggling-
broken/49b0356c-6296-4c7a-b107-86af5f5dc299/.

Goodall, “Warbirds Directory.’

“Hunts reportedly finish sale of Bache Holdings,’ Associated Press, October 23, 1980. Tim
Carrington, The Year They Sold Wall Street (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), 170.
“Declassified State Department Cable,’ US Department of State, July, 1977,
https://archive.org/details/StateDeptcable1 977-162169.

Seymour, Last Circle, 71; For Maheu and RFK, see Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real
History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Kindle (Feral House, 2018).

Seymour, Last Circle, 95-6.

Seymour, Last Circle, 74-5.

Seymour, Last Circle, 71.

106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114

115
116
Tig

118
119

120

121

122
123

124

125

126

127

128

Seymour, Last Circle, 349.
Seymour, Last Circle, 349.
Seymour, Last Circle, 348.
Seymour, Last Circle, 204.
Seymour, Last Circle, 105.
Seymour, Last Circle, 307.
Seymour, Last Circle, 380.
Seymour, Last Circle, 380.

David Wilkison, “Journalist Investigating Bank Was Second To Die,” AP News, August 15, 1991,
https://apnews.com/article/e2fc70d3fe4808d7e34529c7173eeee7.

Seymour, Last Circle, 41.

Seymour, Last Circle, 204.

Seymour, Last Circle, 12.

Seymour, Last Circle, 6.

Seymour, Last Circle, 6; United States v. Abbell, US District Court for the Southern District of
Florida, April 3, 1997, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
courts/FSupp/963/1178/1645124/.

Emma North-Best, “The Danny Casolaro Primer: 13 Reasons to Doubt the Official Narrative
Surrounding His Death,’ MuckRock, March 15, 2018,
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/mar/15/danny-casolaro-primer/.

“Correspondence between John Dwyer and Charles Work,” March 1994,

1991, https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1991-02-07-2786588-story.html.

Martha M. Hamilton, “Robert Maxwell's Death at Sea Gives Birth to a Big Mystery,”
Washington Post, December 23, 1991,

Keith Schneider, “Plane Crash in Georgia Kills 23, Including Former Senator Tower,” New York
Times, April 6, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/06/us/plane-crash-in-georgia-kills-
23-including-former-senator-tower.html.

Congressional Hearing On The Attorney General's Refusal To Provide Congressional Access To
“Privileged” Inslaw Documents, Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law,
Committee on the Judiciary, One Hundred First Congress, Second Session, 1990,

ongressionalAccessToPr/.
“Profile: Nicholas Bua,’ History Commons,

entity=nicholas bua 1. E
Joel Sucher, “The Octopus Lives: How Danny Casolaro’s ‘Suicide’ Foreshadowed Our Current
Dystopia,’ CovertAction Magazine, October 10, 2021,

suicide-foreshadowed-our-current-dystopia/.

129
130

131

132

133

134

135
136

137

138
139

140
141

142
143

144
145
146

147
148
149
150

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 37.

Energy Research Abstracts, Vol. 5, 1980, 1745, https://books.google.com/books?id=qN-
wVvAAAAMAAJ.

Hearings Before the Committee on Finance: The Trade Reform Act of 1973, United States Senate,
Ninety Third Congress, Second Session, Vol. 11, parts 2-4, 1974, 1494,
https://books.google.com/books/about/The Trade Reform Act of 1973.html?
id=GuPPAAAAMAAJ.

Per CCC, they were not actually involved with Penn Central directly. Instead, the company
was just stuck holding worthless Penn-issued commercial paper that bigger banks (like the
Rockefeller-linked First National City Bank of New York) were allowed to cash in at the
Federal Reserve following Penn Central’s bankruptcy. See Robert U. Ayres, The Bubble
Economy: Is Sustainable Growth Possible? (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014),
112.

Craig R. Waters, “Silicon Steppe,” Inc.com, January 1, 1984,

https://www.inc.com/magazine/19840101/1407.html.

Gordon Crovitz, “Pericles, Greece Needs You Back,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 1984,
https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP90-00845R000201300017-4.

Crovitz, “Pericles, Greece Needs You Back.’

Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations on Nomination of Paul C. Warnke, Ninety-
Fifth Congress, First Session, 1977, 187-90, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-
95shrg838720/pdf/CHRG-95shrg838720.pdf.

“The Riddle of Armand Hammer,’ New York Times, November 29, 1981,
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/magazine/the-riddle-of-armand-hammer.html.
Waters, “Silicon Steppe.”

Frank J. Prial, “Business People,” New York Times, January 10, 1979,

control-data-johnson-trusjoist.html.
Prial, “Business People.”

Charles R. Babcock, “Citizen Mondale's Transition Made Him a Conglomerate,” Washington
Post, November 6, 1983,

made-him-a-conglomerate/dcac9467-8c59-45e7-a786-0a0738959eb2/.

Email correspondence between the author and Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Inc., May 2022
Greg Gaut and Marsha Neff, “Red Stars Over Minnesota,” Minnesota History, Winter 2009,
http://collections.mnhs.org/mnhistorymagazine/articles/61/v61i08p346-359.pdf.

Gaut and Neff, “Red Stars.”

Gaut and Neff, “Red Stars.”

David Remnick, “In U.S., Gorbachev Tried to Sella Dream,” Washington Post, June 6, 1990,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/06/in-us-gorbachev-tried-to-
sell-a-dream/ale19e21-3e21-4241-ae67-17a47d763598/.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 84-5.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 83.
Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 160.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 161.

151 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 161.

152 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 162-63.

153 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 163.

154 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 163-64.

155 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 163.

156 “WASHINGTON TALK: Guest List; Early Risers Get Eggs, Bacon and Tower,” New York Times,

risersget-eggs-bacon-and-tower.html.

157 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 170.

158 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 170.

159 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 172-73.

160 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 173.

161 Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 173.

162 Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Final Verdict (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 373.

163 Bower, Maxwell, 373.

164 Claire Sterling, Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (New
York: Simon & Shuster, 1994), 175.

165 Sterling, Thieves’ World, 175.

166 Sterling, Thieves’ World, 195-96. Wanta’s confederates in gold-selling and other fraudulent
activities tied to speculation on the troubled Russian ruble included Jack Tremonti, the
owner of a company registered in Oklahoma called Global Tactical Solutions, and his close
associate Martin Gulewicz. Both individuals had ties to Detroit organized crime circles, and
Gulewicz had been indicted for drug trafficking (Sterling, Thieves World, 187.) In 1978,
Tremonti was described in a Tennessee newspaper as a “Detroit meat dealer” who was
doing time in prison for “larceny of interstate meat shipments.’ This article goes on to
describe how representatives of Tremonti were involved in an attempted marijuana
trafficking operation that was busted as part of a sting. Reportedly, Tremonti himself was
“an informant for the federal government.” See Ralph Dawson, “Setup deal told by pot
defendant,’ The Tennessean, April 26, 1978. Wanta, Tremonti, and Gulewicz were joined by
Michael Preisfreund, a banker and currency trader from Finland whose family had been
longtime suppliers for the Russian military. Preisfreund “knew most of the powerful men in
old Russia and had access to the highest levels of Russian governmental and military
personnel.” Sterling, Thieves’ World, 186.

167 Sterling, Thieves’ World, 195.

168 ATLAS Dossier, Translation provided by Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert
Politics, 10, https://isgp-studies.com/belgium-la-nebuleuse-atlas-dossier-and-dutroux-x-
files.

169 Sterling, Thieves’ World, document insert. According to a 1999 lawsuit, Wanta was using New
Republic in the late 1980s to “make payments from the corporate accounts for his own
benefit” and to “avoid collection of outstanding tax warrants.’ State of Wisconsin v. Leo F.
Wanta, No. 98-0318-CR, February 4, 1999, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/wi-court-of-
appeals/1309687.html.

170 ATLAS Dossier, 11. The dossier names one of the Russians involved as Mike Brandwain, head
of an Antwerp-based firm called M & S International. M & S, according to Robert Friedman,

171
172
173

174
175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183
184
185

186
187

188
189

was part of “a heroin ring of French Connection proportions” that moved the drug from
Thailand to the US by way of Europe. This ring was operated by the Russian-American
gangster Boris Nayfeld, who by the early 1990s was a frontman for the Ukrainian mob boss
Marat Balagula. Notably, one of Balagula’s more notorious criminal conspiracies involved
“import[ing] gasoline to Sierra Leone, which was brokered through the Spanish office of
Marc Rich by Rabbi Ronald Greenwald.’ Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob
Has Invaded America, ePub (Warner Books, Inc, 2000), 65, 103.

Dun & Bradstreet, D&B Who Owns Whom (Gap Books, 1989), 41.

Thomas., Robert Maxwell, p. 172-173

Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, One Point Safe. Anchor Books, 1997, 1st Anchor
Books ed (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 108.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 172-73.

S.C. Gwynne and Larry Gurwin, “The Russian Connection,’ TIME, Vol. 148, No. 3, July 8, 1996,
35.

Andrew Cockburn and Cockburn, One Point Safe, 1st Anchor Books ed (New York: Anchor
Books, 1997), 106.

“Rich Worked with Russian Mafia?” Swissinfo, June 13, 2002,
https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/arbeitete-rich-mit-russen-mafia-/2764916

Bruce Raphael, King Energy: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial Empire Gone Awry (iUniverse,
2000), 537-38.

“Zug lawyer involved in criminal proceedings,’ Zentralplus, June 18, 2014, Zuger Anwalt in
Strafverfahren verwickelt zentralplus.

“Zug lawyer involved in criminal proceedings.”

Thomas Scheuer, “The Millions of the Mielke Advocate,’ Focus Magazine, No. 43, 1999,
https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/die-millionen-des-mielke-advokaten-
vereinigung-skriminalitaet_id_1927402.html.

“Transfer of United States High Technology to the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc Nations:
Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on
Government Affairs, US Senate United States Senate Committee on Government Affairs,
Ninety- Seventh Congress, Second Session, 1982, 413,

aSpa34c.

“Rich Linked to Money Laundering.”

“Rich Linked to Money Laundering.”

Loutchansky v. Times Newspapers Ltd. & Ors. England and Wales High Court (Queen’s Bench
Division), December 12, 2002, https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/S5a8ff7b-
860d03e7f57eb175b

Loutchansky v. Times Newspapers.

Report of the Procura della Repubblica di Bologna: Direzione distrettuale antimafia, Archived at
the Transborder Corruption Archive, p. 109, https://tbcarchives.org/wp-
content/uploads/spider-web2.pdf.

Friedman, Red Mafiya, 252, 245.

Friedman, Red Mafiya, 244, 240.

190

191

192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203

204
205
206

207

208

209

210

211
212
213

214

215

Alan Block and Constance Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering,
and International Organized Crime (Praeger, 2004), 166.

“In Re Bank of New York Derivative Litigation,” United States District Court Southern District
of New York, 22, https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg65701/BONY-
AMC.pdf.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 22.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 97-99.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded By Desire, 100-5.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 22.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 22.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 131.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 24.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 24.

“In Re Bank of New York,’ 23.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 190.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, ch. 8.

Russian Money Laundering: Hearing Before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services,
US House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixth Congress, First Session, September 21, 22,
1999, 414.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 166.

Friedman, Red Mafiya, 65, 67.

Robert I. Friedman, “The Fixer,’ New York Magazine, June 19, 1995, 63-64. Friedman quotes
one individual familiar with Kalmanovitch as saying that “Wherever you looked in the world,
Kalmanovitch knew the spookiest, the dirtiest, the weirdest people. Paraguayan ex-Nazis,
New York mafiosos, South African neo-fascists, US congressmen, CIA agents—spooks of
every description”

Friedman, “The Fixer,’ 64.

Friedman, Red Mafiya, 206.

Press Release: IMF Approves Augmentation of Russia Extended Arrangement and Credit
under CCFF; Activates GAB. International Monetary Fund, July 20, 1988,
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/14/01/49/pr9831.

Natalya Shulyakovskaya, “Skuratov Says IMF Billions Sold on the Sly,’ St. Petersburg Times,
September 17, 1999.

Block and Weaver, All is Clouded by Desire, 147.

“Russiagate, ecco le prove,’ La Repubblica, October 6, 1999.

“Ecnu KacbaAHos npneperT sB UBeñųapno, ero BbIZOBYyT K CnegoBaTtento?” Novaya Gazeta, July
24, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20131202222313/http://old.novayagazeta.ru/data/2000/52/00
-html.

“NY Bank in Money Laundering Inquiry,’ The Irish Times, August 20, 1990; “A Mess of Mafia
Money - Fact or Fancy?,” Jerusalem Post, Septembr 3, 1999.

“Newspaper Scandal Over IMF Diversion Expands,’ Monitor, Vol. 6, Issue 144, July 25, 2000,
https://jamestown.org/program/newspaper-scandal-over-imf-diversion-expands/.

216

217

218

219
220

Dominick Dunne, “Death in Monaco,’ Vanity Fair, December, 2000,

/dunne200012.

Dunne, “Death in Monaco.”

David Kohn, “Murder in Monaco: An American On Trial,” CBS News, July 8, 2003,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/murder-in-monaco-an-american-on-trial/.

Dunne, “Death in Monaco.”
Dunne, “Death in Monaco.”

CHAPTER 10

GOVERNMENT BY BLACKMAIL:
THE DARK SECRETS OF THE
REAGAN ERA

“ROY COULD FIX ANYONE IN THE CITY”

[conna PROMIS, BCCI, and related schemes of the Reagan era are clear

examples of how the alliance between intelligence networks and organized
crime resulted in both national and international business rackets with criminal
elements. Such conspiracies largely succeeded thanks to individuals at the highest
levels of government, particularly in the Justice Department, who worked to
protect these rackets and the bad actors behind them.

Much of the “dirty laundry” of these different criminal enterprises would be
mopped up in the early 1990s by none other than William Barr, who started his
career at the CIA and served as George H.W. Bush's Attorney General. Barr would
play a major role in covering up Iran-Contra, PROMIS, and BCCI, as seen in his
pardoning of Iran-Contra criminals, his patronage of the Bua report, and his
thwarting of indictments related to BCCI’s 1991 collapse, respectively.

Some have explained these specific scandals away, painting them as blights of
the Reagan-Bush administrations and treating these intelligence-organized crime
rackets as isolated incidents. However, instead, it appears that these intelligence-
organized crime networks were so central to the national power structure by the
time Reagan took office that the more well-known scandals of the era can be seen
as “business as usual” for the period. Yet, lurking beneath Iran-Contra and other
scandals that rocked the Reagan administration, there were darker and more
nefarious activities that reached the highest levels of power during the same
period, but received considerably less media attention.

These other, lesser known scandals and crimes of the era show that, during the
reigns of Reagan and Bush Sr., the rot reached all the way to the White House. Key
power brokers in this sordid milieu included individuals intimately involved in the
world of sex blackmail, who often bragged about their ability to “fix” and
“manipulate” any politician or powerful individual they sought to influence, for
the benefit of intelligence agencies, organized crime, as well as their own personal
gain.

One figure emblematic of this side of Reagan era politics is none other than
Roy Cohn, whose ties to sex blackmail, organized crime, and the centers of
American political power were already explored in detail in Chapters 2 and 4. By
the late 1970s, Roy’s “favor bank” system, modeled after the system used by the
organized crime-linked Generoso Pope, had led him to grow in both power and
influence, especially politically.

For instance, Cohn’s birthday party in 1979 was attended by “the important
officials of the Democratic, Republican, and Conservative parties, most of the
city’s major elected officials, a number of congressmen, the Chief Judge of the
District Court, and Roy’s usuals,” who included his close friends Si Newhouse,
William Safire, and Donald Trump, among others.* The party was hosted at the
infamous Studio 54, whose owners were Cohn’s clients. Studio 54 was known for
its wild parties, semi-naked performers, and culture of open drug use, with Vanity
Fair once describing it as “the giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse
of beautiful people, endless cocaine, and every kind of sex”? The politicians,
journalists, and celebrities invited to Cohn’s exclusive parties, including those at
Studio 54, were said to be those who “had open accounts in Cohn’s ‘favor bank.’”4

Cohn regularly took “judges, elected officials, men and women of money and
influence” to the club.2 On at least one occasion, Cohn allegedly used a story
about a government official’s drug use at Studio 54 for political purposes. The
official was Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, and Cohn was widely
believed to be the person who leaked details of Jordan's alleged cocaine use at the
club to the New York Times.°

As his political star rose, Cohn’s ties to organized crime not only deep-ened,
but became more public. He gained a reputation as a lawyer for king-pins of
organized crime, counting major mobsters like Tony Salerno of the Genovese
crime family and Carmine Galante of the Bonanno crime family among his
rolodex of clients from the city’s, and nation’s, underworld.

Cohn had also developed even more powerful media connections than those
he had first gained in his youth. Among Cohn’s closest friends during this time
was Barbara Walters, to whom Cohn often referred to as his “fiancée” in public,
and whom he later introduced to the head of the US Information Agency, Chad
Wick, as well as other high rollers in the Reagan White House.“ Yet, Walters was
just one of Cohn’s powerful friends in the media, a group that also included Abe
Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times; William Safire, long-time New
York Times columnist and New York Magazine contributor; and George Sokolsky
of the New York Herald Tribune, NBC, and ABC.È

Cohn was also the attorney and friend of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and
Cohn’s role in involving Murdoch in Contra-related propaganda on behalf of the
US government was discussed in Chapter 7. Cohn also continued to lean on his
life-long friend since high school, Si Newhouse Jr., to exert media influence.?
Newhouse’s media empire had also grown in power and influence — it now
counted among its assets publications such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, The New
Yorker, and numerous local newspapers throughout the United States, as well as
major interests in cable television. New York Magazine later noted that “Cohn used
his influence in the early ’80s to secure favors for himself and his Mob clients in
Newhouse publications” 12

Cohn’s media confidants, like journalist William Buckley of The National
Review and Firing Line, often attacked Cohn’s political enemies — particularly long-
time Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — in their columns, using
Cohn as an anonymous source. Buckley — along with Barbara Walters, Alan
Dershowitz, and Donald Trump - would later serve as character witnesses for
Cohn during his 1986 disbarment hearings and all but Buckley would later draw
controversy for their subsequent connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

With connections like this, it’s no wonder that Stanley Friedman — a law
partner of Cohn, who was later imprisoned over a kickback and bribery scandal
while serving as New York's deputy mayor — told journalist Marie Brenner in 1980
that “Roy could fix anyone in the city.“ Roy Cohn’s “favor bank” and his unique
position as a liaison between the criminal underworld, the rich and famous, and
top media influencers made him a force to be reckoned with. In particular,
however, it ensured his success as a major “political fixer” and his power in this
regard reached its zenith during Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.

In 1979, a year before the election, the New York Daily News reported that
Cohn had “emerged as the city’s preeminent manipulator. A one-man network of
contacts that have reached into City Hall, the mob, the press, the Archdiocese, the
disco-jet set, the courts and the backrooms of the Bronx and Brooklyn where
judges are made and political contributions are arranged” #3

Former Congressman Neil Gallagher later remarked to Cohn’s biographer
Nicholas Von Hoffman that Cohn “was very important in the whole Reagan setup
— look at the number of judges who owed him allegiance through their
appointments. Even today you've got people sitting on the federal bench who kid,
but they don’t kid, that Roy was their rabbi? 14

Cohn’s involvement in Reagan’s 1980 campaign would be critical and, decades
later, would also influence the political style and campaigns of Cohn’s protégé —
Donald Trump. During the 1980 campaign, Cohn would also meet another of his
protégés, Roger Stone. Cohn infamously instructed Stone to leave a hefty bribe
tucked in a suitcase at the doorstep of the Liberal Party’s headquarters during the
1980 campaign, a “dirty trick” that helped Reagan win the state of New York.*®
During this campaign, Cohn would also meet Paul Manafort — an associate of
Stone’s — and introduce both to Donald Trump. Manafort would later serve as
Trump's 2016 campaign manager.

Cohn’s law partner, Tom Bolan, was also an influential force in the Reagan
campaign and later chaired Reagan’s transition team in 1980.1° Reagan then
named Bolan, whom he considered a friend, as a director of the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation, the government’s development finance institution.
Bolan was also the New York finance co-chairman for the Reagan campaign in
both 1980 and 1984. He was also close to others in Cohn’s circle, such as William
F. Buckley Jr., Donald Trump, and Rupert Murdoch.“ In 1989, roughly three
years after Cohn’s death, Bolan attended a party on Robert Maxwell’s yacht, the
Lady Ghislaine, alongside Donald Trump and literary agent Mort Janklow (who
represented Ronald Reagan and two of Cohn’s closest friends: journalists William
Safire and Barbara Walters), among others.+®

Furthermore, Bolan, like Cohn, was instrumental in securing federal
judgeships for several individuals who would later become influential, including
future FBI Director Louis Freeh. Freeh would later be hired by Epstein associate,
lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, to “investigate” the Epstein
scandal, where he allegedly harassed Epstein victims, and was also involved in the

cover-up of the Penn State child molestation and abuse scandal. Cohn was also
able to get friends of clients appointed as federal judges, including Donald
Trump's sister, Maryanne Trump Barry. After Barry was appointed as a federal
judge, Trump called Cohn to thank him for pulling strings on his sister’s behalf.

Though Cohn was not given a public position in the Reagan administration,
he was not merely a “dirty trickster” who worked in the shadows of the Reagan
campaigns. In fact, he worked closely with some of the more visible faces of the
campaign, including the then-manager of Reagan’s 1980 campaign and later CIA
director, William Casey. According to Christine Seymour - Cohn’s long-time
switchboard operator from the late 1960s up until his death in 1986, who listened
in on his calls - Casey and Cohn were close friends and, during the 1980
campaign, Casey “called Roy almost daily:

In the early 1990s, Seymour would attempt to write a book about the calls she
overheard working for Cohn. News of the book was published by the New York
Post in 1994 in a column by Cindy Adams, who wrote that Seymour “monitored
every call in or out, knew everything, everyone, knew where all the bodies were
buried.’ Five months later, Seymour was killed in a suspicious car accident, leaving
her book unfinished. When Seymour's collaborator on the book, Jeffrey Schmidt,
learnt of Seymour's death and the circumstances surrounding it, “he panicked,
took a box of the notebooks [that contained details of Cohn’s calls], and burned
them.”23

Seymour, before her death, had also noted that one of Cohn’s other most
frequent phone pals and closest friends was Nancy Reagan and she was also one of
his clients.~4 Reagan, whose influence over her husband was well-known, was so
close to Cohn that it was largely his death from AIDS that led her to “encourage
her husband to seek more funding for AIDS research”? Ronald Reagan himself
was also a friend of Cohn’s and, according to late journalist Robert Parry, “lavished
favors on Cohn, including invitations to White House events, personal thank-you
notes, and friendly birthday wishes” over the course of his presidency.2®

Given that Reagan heavily courted the evangelical right and promoted “family
values” as president, the close ties between not only himself, but his inner circle,
with Cohn may seem odd. However, Reagan, like Cohn, had deep ties to the same
organized-crime factions that were among Cohn’s clients and affiliates of the same
Mafia figures close to Cohn and his network. One of the men credited as Reagan's

mentor was Lew Wasserman, who was long alleged to have close ties to the mob,
as noted previously in chapter 1.22

Wasserman, the long-time president of MCA and a well-known Hollywood
mogul, is known for not only advancing Reagan's film and television career, but
also for supporting his successful push to become president of the Screen Actors
Guild, which later helped Reagan launch his political career. In addition, MCA
was a major financier of Reagan's successful gubernatorial bid in 1966 and, not
long after Reagan became president, his administration controversially shut down
a massive Department of Justice (DOJ) probe into MCA’s ties to organized
crime. According to Shawn Swords, a documentary filmmaker who explored
Reagan's ties to MCA:

Ronald Reagan was an opportunist. His whole career was guided by MCA - by Wasserman and
[MCA founder] Jules Stein, who bragged that Reagan was malleable, that they could do what
they wanted with him.... That thing about Reagan being tough on [organized] crime — that’s a

fallacy 22

Swords’ characterization of this relationship is supported by an unnamed
Hollywood source cited in a declassified DOJ document, who called Reagan “a
complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything.”*2

What elements of organized crime were connected to Wasserman? As a young
man, Lew Wasserman joined the Mayfield Road Gang, which was run by Moe
Dalitz, a close friend of Meyer Lansky who, per the FBI, was a powerful figure in
Lansky’s criminal enterprise, second only to Lansky himself among members of
the Jewish mob.*! As previously mentioned in Chapter 4, Cohn’s involvement in
the United Dye case revealed that he had been involved with Dalitz’s network
since at least the early 1960s.

Lew Wasserman would later marry Edith Beckerman, whose father was
Dalitz’s lawyer. As noted in chapter 1, Wasserman’s closest friend and lawyer,
Sidney Korshak, also had close ties to Dalitz and once partnered with Lansky in
the Acapulco Towers Hotel.** Notably, the magazine New West stated in 1976 that
Korshak was the “logical successor to Meyer Lansky” Korshak, as a lawyer, fit a
niche similar to that occupied by Roy Cohn and gained a reputation as a bridge
between organized crime and “respectable” society.*=

In addition, the DOJ probe into MCA that the Reagan administration
quashed had reportedly been launched after the Justice Department learned that

an influential member of the Gambino crime family, Salvatore Pisello, was doing
business with the massive entertainment company. At that time, the boss of the
Gambino crime family, Paul Castellano, was a client of Roy Cohn.*2 As noted in
the previous chapter, an MCA board member with ties to organized crime and the
network behind the Inslaw Affair, Eugene Gianquinto, had bragged that he was
responsible for the scuttling of DOJ probe in a wiretapped phone call.

Another figure intimately involved with Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign
was Robert Keith Gray, whose activities were discussed in detail in Chapter 5. As
previously mentioned, Gray was said to have been a friend of Cohn’s, but the exact
nature of their relationship is murky. However, Gray, like Cohn, was involved with
Reagan's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976 and then, like Cohn, worked
closely with Casey during the 1980 campaign. Gray later “boasted of his close
relationship with the CIA’s William Casey; Gray used to say that before taking on
a foreign client, he would clear it with Casey,’ according to Newsweek.*8

Gray would go on to co-chair Reagans Inauguration Committee and
afterwards would return to the PR business, taking on several clients, including
Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Mossad-linked hedge fund manager
Marc Rich.*? At the same time, Roy Cohn would also take on Khashoggi as a
client. Shortly thereafter, as will be discussed in the next chapter, Jeffrey Epstein
would also take on Khashoggi as a client, which coincided with the genesis of the
Iran-Contra Affair.

It certainly is an odd coincidence that three men tied in different ways to
sexual blackmail would all begin to circle around a man like Khashoggi, who was
alleged to have used sex blackmail himself, within the same short span of time.
However, it begins to look a bit less like a coincidence when one considers that, by
the late 1980s, several organizations tied, not only to key factions of the Reagan
administration, but also to aspects of the Iran-Contra Affair, would be tied to child
sex abuse, sex trafficking, and sex blackmail.

More overlap in these networks can be seen at a May 2, 1983 “testimonial
dinner” hosted by B’nai Brrith’s Banking and Finance Lodge at the Grand Hyatt
hotel in New York.*2 The hotel, at the time, was a project between Donald Trump,
Cohn’s protégé, and the organized crime-linked Pritzker family discussed in
chapter 1. The Trump-Pritzker partnership began to dissolve around 1993 and
formally ended in 1996.

This “testimonial dinner” was in Roy Cohn’s honor. The dinner’s invitation
states that it took “special pride” in “this well-deserved public tribute” to Cohn
because he has been a “tenacious champion of Israel's right to exist in peace and
security and of American economic political support” for Israel as well as his
“deep-rooted commitment of purpose on behalf of his fellow man.” It was also
noted that he had received honors from the Jewish National Fund and Federation
of Jewish Philanthropies. The latter group, three years later, would merge with the
United Jewish Appeal, which was intimately connected to the philanthropic
activities of Leslie Wexner and Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher at the time (see
chapters 13 and 14). The dinner invitation also notes that Cohn has been “a long-
time member of [the] Banking and Finance Lodge of B’nai B’rith — continuing a
tradition established by his father, Justice Albert Cohn, who was president of the
organization’s New York-New England district”

That Albert Cohn was a high-ranking member of B'nai B'rith, i.e. the president
of its most influential chapter, has some significance. As early as 1878, the New
York Times referred to the B’nai B'rith organization as “one of the most powerful
secret organizations in the United States” that “now exercises an immense
influence in all matters of common interest to the Jewish community.’8 “To bind
its member more closely together,” the article continues, “the seal of secrecy was
stamped upon its proceedings, thereby following the example of the Masonic and
other secret fraternities.” Though a history of B’nai B'rith is beyond the scope of
this book, if indeed — as claimed in this 19" century article — the secret society’s

0 century, and definitely by the 1980s, its leadership

origins were noble, by the 2
had become dominated by powerful men with organized crime and/or
intelligence connections. An early example would be Albert Cohn, whose ties
were detailed in chapter 4, serving as head of B'nai B’rith’s most powerful chapter.
At the time B’nai B'rith was hosting this dinner for Cohn, the organization's
board of overseers included individuals with organized crime connections, such as
Edmond Safra and Edgar Bronfman, as well as Leslie Wexner’s mentor Max
Fisher. As will be noted in chapter 14, B'nai B'rith played a critical role in the
creation of Wexner’s main philanthropic organization, the Wexner Foundation.
What’s perhaps more significant about this dinner are the honorary chairmen
— eight close friends of Cohn that populated his inner circle. Some have already
been mentioned at length in relation to Cohn, including Donald Trump, Rupert
Murdoch, and Stanley Friedman. Others, such as George Steinbrenner were also

well-known friends and clients of Cohn. Another, Gerald Schoenfield, was
described as a “the most influential figure in the theater business” credited with
“reinvigorating” Broadway.

Another honorary chairman, Maxwell Rabb, had previously been a secretary
to president Eisenhower's cabinet, where he was succeeded by Robert Keith Gray
and to whom Rabb left his secretary.*® After leaving the White House, Rabb was
involved in a business deal with organized crime-connected investors like Jack
Cooper and frontmen for Meyer Lansky. He also served on the board of
directors of a company founded by Lansky frontman Louis Chesler.*“ At the time
of the 1983 dinner, Rabb was US ambassador to Italy and was later accused of
involvement in aspects of Iran-Contra. He was also described by the New York
Times as “a long-time acquaintance” of one of Roy Cohn’s clients at the time —
Adnan Khashoggi.*8

Aside from these, other chairmen included Edward Regan, who was
comptroller of the State of the New York from 1979 to 1993 under Governors
Hugh Carey (discussed in chapters 6 and 12) and Mario Cuomo. Regan’s
connection to Cohn is troubling, given Regan’s role as state comptroller. Also
troubling is Regan’s apparent political ethos.

As noted in his 2014 obituary in the New York Times:

In 1988, prosecutors investigated Mr. Regan’s fund-raising practices after the disclosure of a

memo written by a top aide advocating a policy under which “those who give will get” -

suggesting, perhaps, that financial firms that provided the bulk of the comptroller’s campaign
49

contributions would receive state business.

The last honorary chairmen and intimate of Cohn may be the most significant,
at least in the context of this book — Alan C. Greenberg, then chairman of Bear
Stearns. As will be detailed in the next chapter, Greenberg played perhaps the
most crucial role of all in the early rise of Jeffrey Epstein into the networks of the
New York elite.

Other close friends of Cohn could be found on the dinner tribute committee,
including Tom Bolan, Cohn’s law partner, and William Safire. Other members of
that committee included Charles Allen of Allen & Co.; Ron Perelman, the
corporate raider closely tied to Drexel Burnham Lambert; Ron Lauder, of the
Estee Lauder fortune then serving as Reagans Undersecretary of Defense;
representatives of Israel Discount Bank (see chapter 7) and Leumi Bank (see

chapter 3) and several sitting Congressmen and Senators, including Strom
Thurmond, Jack Kemp, and Arlen Specter.

COVENANT HOUSE AND AMERICARES

ię 1968, a Catholic priest named Bruce Ritter asked his superiors for permission

to take homeless teenagers, boys and girls, into his home in Manhattan.*2 Per
Ritter’s account, they agreed and, during a snowstorm in 1969, he sheltered six
runaway teenagers by hosting them in his apartment.*! Ritter’s activities would
later grow into a large, privately funded agency that still exists today, called
Covenant House, which offers a variety of service to homeless and runaway youth.

Roughly two decades after founding the organization, Ritter was accused of
having sexual relationships with some of the teenagers and young adults he had
taken in, and of spending Covenant House funds on lavish gifts and payments to
the vulnerable teenagers he was alleged to have groomed and exploited.> As a
result, Ritter was forced to resign from Covenant House in February 1990.

The main allegation that dogged Ritter, first published by the New York Post,
related to claims that Ritter had paid off a male prostitute with Covenant House
funds in exchange for sex. Four more young men later spoke to The Village Voice
and the New York Times, repeating similar claims and with some alleging that their
sexual relationship with Ritter had begun while they had received services
through Covenant House.$

One of those alleged victims, Darryl Bassile, was 14 at the time. Bassile later
wrote an open letter to Ritter a year after the allegations about the priest's
predatory behavior were published in the New York Post. His letter stated: “You
were wrong for inflicting your desires on a 14-year-old.... I know that someday
you will stand before the one who judges all of us and at that time there will be no
more denial, just the truth.”-4

As the allegations made their way through the press, nearly half of the charity's
board resigned in relatively short order. According to the New York Times, the
resignations were related, not just to the sex-related allegations, but also to the
discovery of “a secretive fund set up by Father Ritter that made loans to two board
members, who have since resigned, and to others” Notably, Charles M. Sennott,
the Post reporter who wrote the first story about Ritter’s accusers, would later state

that “the secular powers more than the archdiocese or the Franciscans protected
him [Ritter].”°°

Sennott’s report was attacked viciously by columnists in other New York
media outlets, powerful politicians including then-Governor of New York Mario
Cuomo, and Cardinal John O’Connor. The Archdiocese of New York, now led by
O’Connor, intervened to “broker a deal” between Ritter and the Manhattan
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. O’Connor’s predecessor, Cardinal Francis
Spellman, had been a close friend of Roy Cohn and alleged attendee of the Plaza
Hotel “blackmail parties” involving Cohn, Hoover, and Rosenstiel (see Chapters 2
and 4).

Though accusations swirled around Ritter and were the subject of several
media reports, he was never charged, as “Manhattan District Attorney Robert
Morgenthau said there was not enough evidence of financial misconduct to
charge him with a crime.”>2 Notably, Covenant House decided to hire the “CIA of
Wall Street” Kroll Associates, the firm so deeply connected to Thomas Corbally
(see chapter 4), to “independently investigate” possible financial wrongdoing.*8
Kroll Associates, its longstanding US and Israeli intelligence links and Robert
Maxwell's hiring of the firm prior to his 1991 death are discussed in Chapter 185.
For now, it is important to note that the intelligence-linked investigative firm has
produced “limited hangout” investigations of individuals connected to the
networks explored in this book, such as Adnan Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos,
and had previously been hired by Drexel Burnham Lambert in an effort to help
Michael Milken’s case.>2

In the case of Covenant House, Kroll Associates claimed that “none of the
allegations, when viewed individually, can be proved beyond any question,’ while
also claiming that the “cumulative” evidence against Ritter was “extensive”®® As
for Ritter himself, he denied the charges and had told Sennott by phone that he
had been “set up” by “organized crime”

Ritter’s claims for being “set up” seem dubious, however, when one considers
that his main patron was Robert Macauley, Bush Sr’s roommate at Yale and a long-
time friend of the Bush family.®2 According to reports, Macauley was the key
figure behind Covenant House's rise and his own interest in “humanitarian aid”
coalesced around the time he began his relationship with Ritter.©

Macauley, who first met Ritter in 1977, was described by the New York Times
as “instrumental” to Covenant House fundraising after he joined its board and

especially after he became its chairman in 1985. Indeed, with Macauley as chair,
Covenant House's operating budget grew from $27 million to $90 million and its
board came to include powerful individuals including top executives at IBM,
Chase Manhattan Bank, and Bear Stearns.“ Their alliance, among other things,
led Macauley and Ritter to be jointly granted an audience with Pope John Paul II
in Rome in 1982.6

Macauley was also alleged to have played a major role in courting several
“other wealthy or well-connected people,” including former government officials,
such as William E. Simon — Treasury Secretary under Nixon and Ford — and
investment bankers from Salomon Brothers and Bear Stearns, among others.°
Notably, Simon was also connected to Kissinger Associates and Bechtel (see
Chapter 7) as well as the Epstein-connected Gouletas real estate family, as he
served on the board of the Gouletas family company Tamco (see Chapter 12).

Macauley also introduced Ritter to George H.W. Bush and, through J. Peter
Grace, Ritter met Ronald Reagan. Both Bush and Reagan publicly praised Ritter
during the Reagan administration, including during the 1984 State of the Union
address, which Ritter attended and where Reagan praised Ritter as an “unsung
hero.” Grace, who was not only deeply involved in AmeriCares but also donated
heavily to Covenant House, once chaired the board of a reported CIA front
named the American Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD) and was also
the former head of United Fruit/United Brands, which had CIA links during his
tenure.®8 United Fruit/United Brands would later be led by Eli Black, father of
corporate raider and Epstein associate Leon Black, and - after Black's alleged
suicide —- would be controlled by Leslie Wexner’s “mentors” Max Fisher and
Alfred Taubman (See Chapters 13 and 14). Macauley’s organization, the
AmeriCares Foundation, which was later accused of funnelling money to the
Contras in Central America, was one of the main sources of funding for Covenant
House. Bruce Ritter himself was also tied to AmeriCares, serving as Vice President
of AmeriCares until he was forced to resign from Covenant House.

Despite Macauley’s denials that AmeriCares funded the Contras, the Hartford
Courant reported in 1991 that AmeriCares “sent more than $291,000 in food and
medicine to Nicaragua and $5,750 in cash to [Contra leader Mario] Calero in
1985.’ Its board members, aside from Grace and Macauley, included Trilateral
Commission co-founder and National Security Advisor to Carter, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, former Republican Senator Gordon J. Humphrey, and George H.W.

Bush's brother, Prescott. After George H.W. Bush died, AmeriCares stated that
he had been “instrumental in founding the health-focused relief and development
organization.’ Another AmeriCares board member, who Macauley would later
bring to Covenant House, was William E. Simon, the aforementioned former U.S.
secretary of the treasury. Simon also ran the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, which
sent aid to the Contras and was also tied to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification
Church.“ AmeriCares was also funded by the Unification Church and was deeply

connected to the Catholic organization, the Knights of Malta 3 William Simon,
Roy Cohn’s law partner Tom Bolan, and former CIA director William Casey were
also members of this group. At the time, the president of the Knights of Malta's
American branch was J. Peter Grace.”

AmeriCares was also known to have connections to U.S. intelligence. As the
Hartford Courant noted in 1991: “Knowledgeable former federal officials, many
with backgrounds in intelligence work, help AmeriCares maneuver in delicate
international political environments.’ Also suggestive of intelligence connections
is the fact that AmeriCares “frequently used” the CIA-linked Southern Air
Transport for many of its flights, ee flights it made during the Gulf War to
Kuwait and to Iran in the early 1990s. Southern Air Transport, a few years later,
would become intimately involved with Leslie Wexner’s The Limited and Jeffrey
Epstein (see the end of this chapter and Chapter 17).

Once the Macauley-Ritter alliance was cemented, Covenant House seemed to
become enmeshed in similar intelligence-linked networks. For instance, as
Covenant House grew into an international organization, its first branch in
Central America was opened in Guatemala and was headed by Roberto Alejos
Arzu, a CIA asset whose plantation had been used to train the troops used in the
CIA's failed “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba.” Arzu was also an associate of the
former U.S.-backed dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, and a member of
the Knights of Malta. Alejos Arzu also worked ay for AmeriCares and was
tied to several Central American paramilitary groups.”

Intelligence community sources cited by Franklin Cover-Up author John
DeCamp asserted that the Alejos Arzu-led branch of AN House procured
children for a pedophile ring based in the United States. A few years later, Mi
Casa, another US-run charity in Guatemala that George H.W. Bush had
personally toured with his wife Barbara in 1994, was accused of rampant

pedophilia and child abuse.&?

THE SECRETS OF LARRY KING AND CRAIG SPENCE

ruce Ritter was not the only man accused of preying on minors that would have

contacts nestled deep within the national power structure and with

institutions involved in Contra financing. Around the same time as Ritter’s

downfall, a sordid child sex trafficking and abuse network began to be
exposed. Centered in Omaha, Nebraska, it is remembered today as the “Franklin
Scandal.” The man at the center of this scandal was Lawrence “Larry” King, a
prominent local Republican activist and lobbyist who ran the Franklin
Community Federal Credit Union until it was shut down by federal authorities in
November 1988.

According to journalist and author Nick Bryant, the earliest mention of King
in the press was 1973, when the Omaha Sun reported that King had served in the
Air Force from 1965 to 1969, where he worked as an “information specialist” and
handled “top secret” military communications. After an honorable discharge from
the Air Force, he began studying for a career in the banking industry. At age 25, he
joined a “management training program” at First National Bank in Omaha.
Unsatisfied, he quit the bank in August 1970 and, later that year, Larry’s father was
offered the reins of the faltering Franklin Community Credit Union. His father
declined, but suggested the Credit Union hire his son as its manager. The 1973
Omaha Sun article, as cited by Bryant, lauded King for his supposed
industriousness and work ethos at Franklin.&+

Eventually, and many years before the Credit Union collapsed, King began to
use its funds as “his personal, bottomless ATM.’ His personal wealth greatly
increased and King soon began making major political connections, mainly in the
Republican Party, which King had joined in 1981.2

King soon founded and later chaired the Nebraska Frederick Douglas
Republican Council, which threw a reception honoring King in 1983 for his
“service to the Republican party both locally and nationally.” He became involved
in the National Black Republican Council, where he held several positions, as well
as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he served as
“Secretary/Treasurer.” Author Nick Bryant has noted that King seemed
“particularly interested in children” as he also became involved with the child-
oriented organizations Camp Fire Girls, the Girls Club, and Head Start during this
period.

By the late 1980s, King was hosting parties attended by major political figures,
such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as well as Congressmen Jack
Kemp (a friend of Cohn’s) and Hal Daub. Daub, who represented Nebraska, “had
a stint on Franklins Advisory Board,” according to Nick Bryant. King also
donated to Daub and held a fundraiser for him while also generously donating to
Republican Kay Orr’s campaign for Nebraska governor. In 1982, King sang the
Star Spangled Banner at a National Black Republican Council dinner attended by
Ronald and Nancy Reagan and he would go on to sing the national anthem at the
1984 Republican convention in Dallas. King’s political connections continued to
grow, leading him to form the Council of Minority Americans. A gala hosted by
the Council included former President Gerald Ford, Jack Kemp, and Alexander
Haig (mentioned throughout Chapter 5) on its “host committee.”

These deep connections to the Republican power base in the 1980s also led
King to apparently become involved in the financing of Nicaragua's Contras. Hints
of King’s ties to Contra financing networks first emerged in a May 1989 article in
the Omaha World Herald, which states that: “In the 6 1/2 months since federal
authorities closed Franklin, rumors have persisted that money from the credit
union somehow found its way to the Nicaraguan contra rebels.”®° The possibility
that King’s fraudulent credit union was covertly funding the Contras was
supported by subsequent reporting by the Houston Posts Pete Brewton, who
discovered that the CIA, in conjunction with organized crime, had secretly
borrowed money from various savings and loans (S&L) institutions to fund
covert operations. One of those ss, Silverado, had Neil Bush, George H.W.
Bush's son, on its board and it had done business with King’s organization.

Another link between King and the Iran-Contra affair is King’s donation of
over $25,350 to an organization affiliated with the Reagan administration,
Citizens for America, which sponsored speaking trips for Oliver North and
Contra leaders.88 The group was said to have been “one of the conservative
Washington-based groups that advised former Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and helped
develop a base of citizen support for him.”®? Other groups in this orbit included
the aforementioned AmeriCares. The then-chairman of the group, Donald
Devine, stated that they “supported the Reagan administration's effort to supply
the Contras with US military aid,” but did not directly “funnel money to the

rebels.”22

An officer at Citizens for America at the time was David Carmen, who — after
leaving the group — ran a public relations firm called Carmen, Carmen & Hugel
with his father Gerald, who had also been appointed by Reagan to head the
General Services Administration and then appointed to a subsequent
ambassadorship, and the former head of covert operations at the Casey-led CIA,
Max Hugel.

A 1989 article from the Omaha World Herald stated that King’s donation of
$25,350 netted him access to Citizens for America’s “founders club”? Other
members of the group’s founders club included Ivan Boesky, the insider trader tied
to Drexel Burnham Lambert, and the corporate raider T. Boone Pickens. Boesky
boasted longstanding ties to Max Fisher, a mentor of Leslie Wexner’s.2 Pickens
was a major shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, which was run by Armand
Hammer and somewhat involved in BCCI’s entry into the US financial system
(See Chapter 7).24

King made the $25,350 donation in 1987 and also made other “gifts” to the
organization. A lawsuit filed against King by the National Credit Union
Administration alleged that the large donation had been made with money he had
looted from the Franklin Credit Union. King’s donations to Citizens for
America made up roughly half of the approximate $55,000 King spent on political
donations in total before Franklin’s collapse.”

King’s criminal activities extended far beyond the looting of the Credit Union
he managed, although it would be the investigation into the Credit Union that
would help expose his other acts. In reality, King was a key “pimp” in an “interstate
pedophile network” that trafficked mostly vulnerable children, particularly
orphans from Boys Town Nebraska, across the United States.”

Hints of this emerged in the New York Times in 1988, which cited Nebraska
State Senator Ernie Chambers as having been “told of boys and girls, some of
them from foster homes, who had been transported around the country by
airplane to provide sexual favors, for which they were rewarded,’ as part of King’s
activities.22 The New York Times also cited various law enforcement sources as
stating that money-laundering and drugs were also part of the investigations.
King’s pedophile ring in Omaha allegedly involved many of the city’s most
powerful men, including Harold Andersen, publisher of the Omaha World Herald
and friend of fellow Nebraskan Robert Keith Gray, as well as Omaha Police Chief
Robert Wadman.~ Then-Attorney General of Nebraska Robert Spire was also a

“friend” of King’s who attended King-hosted parties. Spire was later accused of
“sitting on” allegations related to King’s criminal activities +

Several of the witnesses critical to the story of the Franklin Scandal — Alisha
Owen, Paul Bonacci, Danny King, and Troy Boner - independently told
investigators that there were abused in other ways, not just sexually, by Larry
King’s network. Per their accounts, they were also victims of sadistic physical

abuse, which included suffering from whippings, knife wounds, and cigarette
101

burns. Some of the witnesses revealed that they had seen other children at

King’s “parties” and “orgies” who had claimed to have been kidnapped from their
homes, some as young as twelve. At least one told of a child whose molestation,
torture, and subsequent murder were all filmed by King and a group of adults. +

While King was mainly based in Omaha, he was also active in Washington
DC, where he maintained a $5,000 per month residence off of Embassy Row.1%
Intimately related to King’s DC activities was a man named Craig Spence. Spence
had gotten his start as a press assistant for the Governor of Massachusetts before
joining ABC News as a Vietnam War correspondent. According to some of his
fellow Vietnam correspondents, Spence appeared to have an “inside track on
seemingly clandestine information.” He later moved to Tokyo, where he forged a
business relationship with a Japanese politician named Motoo Shiina.

Shiina, after and during his relationship with Spence, was accused of “passing
US military secrets to the Soviets.’ Notably, Shiina appears to have been a member
of the Trilateral Commission, the body founded by David Rockefeller and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, which has been accused of pursuing policies that involve the
transfer of US technology to China and Russia under the guise of “normalizing”
relations and building a “new international economic order” In 1991, Shiina
co-authored a book published by the Trilateral Commission entitled Global
Competition After the Cold War: A Reassessment of Trilateralism with Kurt
Biedenkopf and Joseph S. Nye Jr+° Nye later went on to head the North
American branch of the Trilateral Commission.

In the 1980s, after Shiina was accused of passing “military secrets” to the
Russians, it was subsequently suggested by a member of Congress that Spence
himself may have been involved in this alleged transfer of sensitive technology to
China and Russia. Shortly thereafter, Shiina and Spence parted ways bitterly in
1983. Spence later stated that two bank transfers Shiina had sent him had come

“into the country illegally from Hong Kong.” Spence had used the money to

purchase a lavish property in the DC area, which would become central to his
story.

Once established in DC, Spence became a prominent lobbyist. In the early
1980s, before he parted ways with Motoo Shiina, he described himself as an
“international business consultant, party host, registered foreign agent” and a
“research journalist”! His clients included “a number of American multinational
companies.” Much like Jeffrey Epstein, Spence was often compared to Jay Gatsby,
the mysterious, wealthy figure from the well-known Fitzgerald novel The Great
Gatsby. A 1982 New York Times article written about Spence said “what most
impresses, if not benefits, his clients is his ability to master the social and political
chemistry of this city, to make and use important connections and to bring
together policy makers, power brokers, and opinion shapers at parties and
seminars.” It then stated that “there seems to be an inexhaustible demand in

Washington for the sort of thing Mr. Spence offers.”128

The Times also noted that Spence’s “personal phone book and party guest lists
constitute a “Whos Who’ in Congress, Government, and journalism” and that
Spence was “hired by his clients as much for whom he knows as what he knows.”
Spence also had a reputation for throwing lavish parties, which the Times
described as “glitter[ed] with notables, from ambassadors to television stars, from
senators to senior State Department officials.””1 “According to Mr. Spence,” the
Times article continues, “Richard Nixon is a friend. So is [former Attorney
General under Nixon] John Mitchell. [CBS journalist] Eric Sevareid is termed ‘an
old, dear friend? Senator John Glenn is ‘a good friend’ and Peter Ustinov [British
actor and journalist] is ‘an old, old friend?” H2 Notably, Jeffrey Epstein claimed to
be friends with John Mitchell while Ustinov wrote for The European newspaper
soon after it was founded in 1990 by Robert Maxwell, and where Ghislaine
Maxwell also held a position. Glenn, who represented Ohio, later flew on
Jeffrey Epstein’s jet to attend a birthday dinner for one of Ohio's richest political
donors, Leslie Wexner. Roy Cohn, William Casey, and Roy Cohn’s journalist
friend William Safire were just some of the other attendees at Spence’s festivities.
Cohn, it turns out, was another “good friend” of Spence’s and Spence had hosted
at least one birthday party for Roy Cohn at his DC area home.

It was revealed just seven years after the New York Times published its doting
profile of Spence that his “glittery parties for key officials of the Reagan and Bush

administrations, media stars, and top military officers” had been bugged in order

“to compromise guests.’ According to the explosive report published by the
Washington Times, Spence was linked to a “homosexual prostitution ring” whose
clients included “government officials, locally based U.S. military officers,
businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives, and
other professionals” + Spence also offered cocaine to his guests as another means
of acquiring blackmail.

According to the report, Spence’s home “was bugged and had a secret two-
way mirror, and ... he attempted to ensnare visitors into compromising sexual
encounters that he could then use as leverage.” One man who spoke to the
Washington Times said that Spence sent a limousine to his home, which took him
to a party where “several young men tried to become friendly with him.’
According to John DeCamp, Spence was known to offer his guests young children
for sex at his blackmail parties. H4

Several other sources cited by the Washington Times, including a Reagan
White House official and an Air Force sergeant who had attended Spence-hosted
parties, confirmed that Spence’s house was filled with recording equipment, which
he regularly used to spy on and record guests, and his house also included a two-
way mirror that he used for eavesdropping. =>

The report also documented Spence’s alleged connections to US intelligence,
particularly the CIA. According to the Washington Times report, Spence “often
boasted that he was working for the CIA and on one occasion said he was going to
disappear for awhile ‘because he had an important CIA assignment.” He was also
quite paranoid about his alleged work for the agency, as he expressed concern
“that the CLA might ‘double-cross him’ and kill him instead and then make it look
like a suicide.’4® Not long after the Washington Times report on his activities was
published, Spence fell from grace and was later found dead in the Boston Ritz
Carlton. His death was ruled a suicide.

The Washington Times report also offers a clue as to what Spence may have
done for the CIA, as it cited sources that said Spence had spoken of smuggling
cocaine into the US from El Salvador, an operation that he claimed involved US
military personnel.“ Given the timing of these comments from Spence, Spence’s
powerful connections, and the CIA’s involvement in the exchange of cocaine for
weapons in the Iran-Contra scandal, his comments could have been more than
just boasts intended to impress his party guests.

One of the most critical parts of the scandal surrounding Spence, however,
was the fact that he had been able to enter the White House late at night during
the George H.W. Bush administration with young men whom the Washington
Times described as “call boys” H8 After his fall from grace, Spence later stated that
his contacts within the White House, which allowed him and his “call boys” after-
hours access, were “top level” officials and he specifically singled out George H.W.
Bush's then-National Security Advisor Donald Gregg"? Gregg had worked at the
CIA since 1951 before he resigned in 1982 to become National Security Advisor
to Bush, who was then vice president. Gregg denied Spence’s allegations.

Prior to resigning from his post at the CIA, Gregg had worked directly under
William Casey and, in the late 1970s, had worked alongside a young William Barr
in stonewalling the Pike Committee and the Church Committee, which
investigated the CIA beginning in 1975122 Among the things that these
committees were tasked with investigating were the CIA’s “love traps,’ or sexual

blackmail operations used to lure foreign diplomats to bugged apartments,

complete with recording equipment and two-way mirrors.+ Gregg’s role in Iran-

Contra and other events during the Reagan years are discussed in Chapter 7.

The Washington Times article on this affair, stated that there was an official
inquiry into Spence’s activities and blackmail. However, it appeared to imply that
the Department of Justice official managing the inquiry had a conflict of interest.
It states:

The office of US Attorney General Jay B. Stephens, former deputy White House counsel to
President Reagan, is coordinating federal aspects of the inquiry but refused to discuss the
investigation or grand jury actions.

Several former White House colleagues of Mr. Stephens are listed among clients of the
homosexual prostitution ring, according to the credit card records, and those persons have
confirmed that the charges were theirs.

Mr. Stephens’ office, after first saying it would cooperate with The Times’ inquiry, withdrew
the offer late yesterday and also declined to say whether Mr. Stephens would recuse himself
from the case because of possible conflict of interest.

At least one highly placed Bush administration official and a wealthy businessman who
procured homosexual prostitutes from the escort services operated by the ring are cooperating
with the investigation, several sources said.

Among clients who charged homosexual prostitutes services on major credit cards over the
past 18 months are Charles K. Dutcher, former associate director of presidential personnel in
the Reagan administration, and Paul R. Balach, Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole’s political

personnel liaison to the White House?122

Despite the names that surfaced in connection with Spence, including several
different White House connections, it seems that — following his fall from grace
and death — interest in the case disappeared and was largely memory-holed, not
unlike what would follow years later in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The information contained within the Washington Times reports was
subsequently corroborated by Henry Vinson, who operated the “largest gay escort
service ever uncovered in DC.’ Vinson had been significantly involved with
Spence in Washington, DC and had received “thousands and thousands of dollars
a month” from Spence at his escort service. Vinson claimed that he had been
invited by Spence to his home “on numerous occasions” and that Vinson
witnessed Spence flaunt his predilection for “cocaine and little boys.’ “He
[Spence] was definitely a pedophile,” Vinson would later tell Nick Bryant.+23

Spence had also showcased his blackmail equipment to Vinson. Vinson, as
quoted in Bryant’s Franklin Scandal, stated:

Spence showed me the hidden, secret recording devices that were scattered throughout his
home.... Spence often alluded to the fact that he was connected to the CIA, and it was obvious
to me that he was very well connected. There were people at his home who said they were CIA,
and at least one or two Secret Service agents — I believe that it was some of the CIA operatives
who installed Spence’s blackmail equipment. Much of Spence’s influence came from the House
of Representatives and the Senate, and he told me he was blackmailing Congressmen. I believe

that Spence was blackmailing both for the CIA and for his own personal purposes. 124

Vinson alleged that former CIA director William Casey was also a “personal
friend” of Spence and attended his parties. Vinson additionally alleged that Casey
had been one of his patrons, in addition to Spence, and had begun requesting gay
escorts from Vinson in 1986. Vinson stated that Casey’s “preferred escort was an
eighteen-year-old with minimal body hair and a slender swimmer’s physique.”
Vinson asserted that Casey had requested underage escorts, which Vinson

declined to provide.

It would be Vinson’s refusal to supply underage escorts to
Craig Spence that would bring about his downfall and subsequent arrest.12°
Vinson also told Nick Bryant that Spence and Larry King were “partners” and
“hooked up with the CIA,” stating specifically that “King and Spence were in
business together, and their business was pedophilic blackmail.” “They were
transporting children all over the country. They would arrange for children to be
flown into Washington, DC and also arrange for influential people in DC to be

flown out to the Midwest and meet these kids.”

Paul Rodriguez, one of the Washington Times journalists who had helped
expose Spence, also later told Nick Bryant that Spence and King had been
partners, stating “I was told by several prostitutes along with law enforcement that
there were connections between Craig Spence and Larry King. The allegations
were that Spence and King hosted parties and were involved in a variety of
nefarious activities: the allegations included Spence and King hosting blackmail
sex parties that included minors and illegal drug use.’ Bryant also corroborated
the Spence-King connection with Rusty Nelson and Paul Bonacci, who had both
met Spence through King on different occasions.122

Per Vinson, Larry King had confided in him that he had clients who liked to
torture and even kill children: “King said they had clients who actually liked
having sex with kids as they tortured or killed the kid. I found that totally
unbelievable.” After Vinson said this to Nick Bryant, he asked Bryant later on in
the interview if King’s disclosure had indeed been true.” He was unaware at the
time that other evidence, including witness testimony, had suggested that it was.

FROM OMAHA TO COLUMBUS: EXECUTIVE JET
AVIATION

Le King, before the Franklin Credit Union and related scandals completely

unraveled, made extensive use of an airline called Executive Jet Aviation
(EJA). King appears in the July 1987 issue of Jet magazine, where he was being
congratulated personally by EJA executives Joseph B. Campbell and Skip
Hockman “for being the passenger aboard the EJA jet that flew the company’s 1
millionth mile of service” and was even “presented a model of the aircraft” on
which he had flown. Jet also described King as being “a frequent user of EJA’s
service”??? When EJA was later roped into a Congressional inquiry, accusations of
the airline’s alleged involvement in procuring girls for clients made their way into
the questioning of company executives, as did allegations of the girls’ exploitation
for the purposes of blackmail +22

EJA was founded as Executive Jet Airways in 1964 by Brig. Gen. Olbert
“Dick” Fearing Lassiter, an Air Force officer who was “known for his lust for
excitement and fast living,’ characteristics which earned him the nickname “Rapid
Richard.”14! EJA was originally founded in Delaware, but Lassiter quickly moved
the company to Columbus, Ohio. Lassiter had been stationed in Columbus at

Lockbourne Air Force Base, now known as Rickenbacker Airport, and was still a
part of the Air Force when he incorporated EJA. Lassiter allegedly relocated EJA
to Columbus mainly because “of the friendships he had made there.”*4

EJAs initial board of directors included actor Jimmy Stewart, former Assistant
Secretary of the Navy James H. Smith, and former chairman of the Rockefeller
family’s Standard Oil branch in New Jersey, Monroe J. Rathbone.“ At the time of
its founding, it was “a closely held secret” that EJA had been financed by the
American Contract Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pennsylvania
Railroad.

In 1965, the company adopted the name Executive Jet Aviation and created a
subsidiary based in Switzerland. The Swiss subsidiary was largely led by Paul
Tibbets, who served as its executive vice president and general manager.1*+
Tibbets, who had also been on the founding board of EJA, is best known as the
pilot of the Enola Gay when it dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of
Hiroshima at the close of World War II. By 1967, Tibbets and others left EJA.
Tibbets allegedly left because “he believed some things that were going on [at the
airline] were flagrantly illegal.”

That same year, the parent company of the American Contract Company, the
Pennsylvania Railroad, merged with the New York Central Railroad to form the
Penn Central Transportation Company, better known as Penn Central.
Rockefeller interests and Clinton Murchison Sr. were among those with financial
stakes in New York Central and its subsidiaries at the time. The railroad also did
significant business, including mergers and acquisitions, with individuals closely
tied to the CIA-linked David Baird Foundation (see Chapters 1 and 4).4°° Penn
Central would collapse in 1971, becoming one of the biggest bankruptcies in US
history and what Peter Dale Scott referred to as “bankruptcy fraud with organized
crime overtones” +36

It would later emerge that Bruce Sundlun, a Washington attorney with past
ties to Lassiter who was also on the EJA board of directors, would be responsible
for the “covert” marriage between Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central and EJA.
Their joining was performed by Glore Forgan at Sundlun’s behest. Glore Forgan’s
vice president was General Charles Hodge, a Wall Street broker who was also the
chief investment advisor to Penn Central and sat on the board of EJA1%“ As
mentioned in Chapter 6, Glore Forgan was the same firm used by William Casey
in his business ventures related to Multiponics.

The Penn Central link to EJA eventually emerged when Lassiter attempted to
obtain a certificate that would have allowed him to operate larger aircraft. The
Civil Aeronautics Board, which had a previous ruling forbidding a railroad from
controlling an air carrier, discovered the tie and determined that the railroad had
put around $22 million into the company. They then blocked Lassiter’s request for
the certificate and ordered the railroad to divest from EJA. Lassiter then
proceeded as follows:

Since he was barred from using the larger jets for domestic operations, Lassiter leased them to
International Air Bahama, a Lichtenstein corporation he had persuaded a number of foreign
investors to organize, which offered cut-rate service between Nassau and Luxembourg.
However, although money was being made, lease money wasn't getting back to Executive Jet.

The money Lassiter raised, said Tibbets, allowed him to live like a millionaire”138

Despite the Civil Aeronautics Board's ruling, Penn Central money continued
to flow into EJA, albeit via a more convoluted route. This was reportedly made
possible, according to the New York Times, by Lassiter arranging “dates” for the
aforementioned Charles Hodge as well as David Bevan, Penn Central's CFO, so
that the two men would “continue the flow of railroad funds to Executive Jet.”42
Both Hodge and Bevan were on the EJA board. The Times goes on to quote an
official complaint, which stated: “The steady flow of Penn Central money to
Executive Jet was maintained by Lassiter’s procuring of young women to
accompany Bevan and Hodge on various junkets in the United States and
Europe”#2

Paul Tibbets was also quoted as saying that “A weakness for beautiful women
contributed to his [Lassiter’s] problems, according to more than one magazine
article that appeared while EJA’s difficulties were making headlines”+# Lassiter
reportedly maintained furnished apartments in New York City and elsewhere in
the US, as well as foreign cities that included Rome, where some of these women
would allegedly accompany him.

In 1970, Bruce Sundlun, the attorney on the EJA board of directors who first
connected the company to Penn Central, raided EJA’s offices as the company
began its descent. In the course of that raid, Sundlun reportedly came across “a
large stack of color photographs” that showed Lassiter “in the company of various
young women, all of them very pretty and amply endowed? +2
During inquiries about the collapse of Penn Central, as previously mentioned,

the congressional hearings involved lines of questioning directed at Lassiter about

the procurement of women for Bevan and Hodge, which was allegedly performed
by J.H. Ricciardi. Ricciardi had testified in 1968 that he had procured these
women “to relieve the pressure they were exerting on Mr. Lassiter to get the
company into the black.’“8 Ricciardi also sued EJA over fees he claimed were
owed to him for his efforts to procure women, which Ricciardi said he did at
Lassiter’s request. Lassiter denied Ricciardi’s allegations and accused Ricciardi of
“blackmail? 144

In addition, at those same congressional hearings that followed Penn Central’s
implosion, Congressman J.W. Wright Patman (D-TX) stated that EJA’s role in the
Penn Central collapse raised “most serious questions about the involvement of the
commercial banking industry in the strange and far-flung operations of Executive
Jet Aviation |... ] Commercial banks made massive amounts of credit available to
Executive Jet Aviation for what appeared to be highly questionable - if not at
times illegal — activities.’***

After Penn Central’s 1970 collapse, it re-emerged in 1977, not as a railroad
company, but as an “energy, recreation, and real estate company.”/“° A year later, it
was disclosed that corporate raider Saul Steinberg, mentioned in Chapters 8 and 9
and who had previously tried to acquire Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press, had
obtained 7.9 percent of the new incarnation of Penn Central, which grew to 13
percent a year later.““4 Cincinnati financier Carl Lindner Jr. obtained 30 percent of
the company between 1981 and 1982, which included Steinberg’s position.
Lindner became chairman of Penn Central in 1983.18 The broker for these trades
was Drexel Burnham Lambert’s Michael Milken. Also involved was Randall Smith
Jr, then at Bear Stearns who later went on to become a prominent “vulture
capitalist”?

Lindner Jr. was also, at the time, intimately involved in Meshulam Riklis’
Rapid-American, which — as mentioned in Chapter 2 — contained the remnants of
Lewis Rosenstiel’s business interests.°2 He was also seemingly connected to Jack
DeVoe, the cocaine smuggler mentioned in Chapter 7, as DeVoe maintained his
planes at a club and airstrip that Lindner owned.**+ In addition, the year after
Lindner became chairman of Penn Central, Lindner Jr. would be given the reins of
United Brands, a company with CIA links, by Leslie Wexner’s “mentor” Max
Fisher and his associates (see Chapter 13).

As for Executive Jet Aviation, it was foreclosed upon before reopening with
Bruce Sundlun in charge. Paul Tibbets would return to the company around the

same time and would succeed Sundlun as president in 1976. In 1984, with
Tibbets still serving as president, EJA was acquired by Richard Santulli.
Previously, Santulli had served as president of Goldman Sachs’ leasing division,
which bought helicopters and airplanes and then leased them to companies.
Santulli left in 1980 to create his own leasing company, RTS Capital Services.+°2
EJA became a subsidiary of RTS and was later renamed as NetJets. It was during
this era of EJA that Lawrence King, of Franklin Scandal fame, became a “frequent
user of EJA’s service’, which — as previously mentioned — brought him into close
contact with EJA executives.3

In 1993, at least two EJA pilots were recruited by Leslie Wexner’s The
Limited, or Lbrands. One of these pilots, Eric Black, had been an EJA pilot
starting in 1988, then working for an EJA subsidiary in Miami - Executive Jet
Management - transporting checks for the Federal Reserve. He returned to EJA’s
Columbus location in 1993, before being hired as a pilot for The Limited in
August 1993. Black is now the Lead Captain for Lbrands flights.+** Another pilot,
Mike Crater, also joined The Limited from EJA, where he had worked since 1986,
in August 1993.45

1993 was a curious time in the activities of The Limited, particularly as it
relates to its air freight concerns. As will be detailed in Chapter 17, in May of that
year, The Limited was courted by a company called Polar Air Cargo, which sought
to install itself at the Rickenbacker airstrip, once home to the Air Force Base
where Lassiter had been stationed when he created Executive Jet. Polar Air Cargo,
as reported by the Columbus Dispatch, was a joint venture of NedMark
Transportation, Polaris Aircraft Leasing Corporation, and the now infamous CIA-
linked airline Southern Air Transport. 156 At the time, more than half of Polar Air
Cargo’s employees had formerly worked for Flying Tiger Line, which — as noted in
Chapter 5 — was tied to Anna Chennault and Robert Keith Gray. Though Polar Air
Cargo’s efforts would be for naught, The Limited, with direct input from Jeffrey
Epstein, would be largely responsible for the relocation of Southern Air Transport
to Rickenbacker in 1995.

Endnotes

10
11

13
14
15

Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 402.
Gabriel H. Sanchez, “29 Pictures That Show Just How Insane Studio 54 Really Was,’ Buzz-Feed

insane-studio-54-really-was.

Bob Colacello, “Studio 54’s Cast List: A Who's Who of the 1970s Nightlife Circuit,” Vanity Fair,
September 4, 2013, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1996/03/studio-54-nightclub-
newyork-city.

Tate Delloye, “Roy Cohn: New Documentary Explores the Man Who Made Donald Trump,’
Mail Online, March 14, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6809557/Roy-Cohn-

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 403.
Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 405-407.
Frank Rich, “Roy Cohn was the Original Donald Trump,’ Intelligencer, April 29, 2018,

trump.html.

Rich, “Original Donald Trump.’
Rich, “Original Donald Trump.’
Rich, “Original Donald Trump.’

Barbara Walters’ name can be found in Epstein’s black book of contacts. See “Epstein’s Black
Book,’ https://epsteinsblackbook.com/names/barbara-walters; Rich, “Original Donald
Trump.”

Alan Feuer, “Up From Politics, Almost,” New York Times, October 1, 2004,

relationship.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 414.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 334.

Jeffrey Toobin, “The Dirty Trickster,’ The New Yorker, May 23, 2008,

scenes-donald-trump-roger-stone-show/,
Sam Roberts, “Thomas A. Bolan, Understated Force in New York Law, Dies at 92,’ New York

roy-cohn-law-partner.html.

Roberts, “Thomas A. Bolan,’; Wanda Carruthers, “Tom Bolan, Famed Attorney and Roy Cohn’s
Law Partner, Dies,” Newsmax, May 14, 2017, https://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Tom-
Bolan-dies-lawyer-conservative/2017/05/14/id/790052/.

20

21
22
23
24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

“Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Her Dad’s (Robert) Yacht in May 1989,” St. Louis
and-ghislaine-maxwell-on/.

David Ingram, “Sex Claim Filing Against Dershowitz a Mistake, Say Florida Lawyers;
Defamation Claims Settled,” Insurance Journal, April 12, 2016,
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2016/04/12/404808.htm; Victor Thorn,
“Louis Freeh: The Cover-up Goes National,’ American Free Press, June 22, 2012,

Carruthers, “Tom Bolan,’; Marcus Baram, “Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump,’
The New Yorker, April 14, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-

Baram, “Eavesdropping.”

Baram, “Eavesdropping.”

Baram, “Eavesdropping.”

Becky Little, “Roy Cohn: From Ruthless ‘Red Scare’ Prosecutor to Donald Trump's Mentor,’

trial-donald-trump.
James Michael Nichols, “Hillary Clinton Apologizes After Shocking Praise For Nancy Reagan's

nancy-reagan-aids-activism n 56e31 770e4b0b25c9181e002.

Robert Parry, “How Roy Cohn Helped Rupert Murdoch,’ Consortium News, January 28, 2015,
Jerry Oppenheimer, “President Reagan’s Mafia Ties Revealed in Explosive New
Documentary,’ Mail Online, May 21, 2014, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
2635094/EXCLUSIVE-Revealed-MAFIA-helped-Ronald-Reagan-White-House-Shocking-

levels.html.
Oppenheimer, “President Reagan's Mafia Ties,’; Tina Daunt, “New Doc Alleges Ronald
Reagan Blocked Probe Into Lew Wasserman’s Mafia Ties,’ The Hollywood Reporter, June 12,

reagan-711288/.

Oppenheimer, “President Reagan’s Mafia Ties.”

Oppenheimer, “President Reagan’s Mafia Ties.”

Carl Sifakis, The Mafia Encyclopedia, 3. ed (New York: Checkmark Books, 2005), 132.

Mike Barnes, “Edie Wasserman, Wife of Lew Wasserman, Dies at 95,’ The Hollywood Reporter,

wasserman-wife-lew-wasserman-225101/,

Gus Russo, Supermob: How Sidney Korshak And His Criminal Associates Became America’s
Hidden Power Brokers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 158.

New West, Volume 1, p. 27, https://www.google.com/books/edition/New West/6Sk-
cAQAAIAAJ.

Nick Tosches, “The Man Who Kept The Secrets,’ Vanity Fair, April 6, 1997,
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1997/04/The-Man-Who-Kept-The-Secrets.

Oppenheimer, “President Reagan’s Mafia Ties.”

37

38

39

40

41
42
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46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53
54
55

56

David Cay Johnston, “Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?’ POLITICO Magazine,

mob-organized-crime-213910.

Newsweek Staff, “The Bcci-Cia Connection: Just How Far Did It Go?;” Newsweek, December 6,
1992, https://www.newsweek.com/bcci-cia-connection-just-how-far-did-it-go-195454,
Susan Trento, “Lord of the Lies; How Hill and Knowlton’s Robert Gray Pulls Washington’s
Strings,” Washington Monthly, September 1, 1992,
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Lord+of+the+lies%3B+how-+Hillt+and+Knowlton%27s+Ro
bert+Gray+pulls...-a012529888.

“B'nai B'rith Testimonial Dinner in Honor of Roy Cohn,” May 2, 1983,

“B’Nai B'rith Dinner.’

“B’Nai B'rith Dinner.’

“The Order of B’Nai B'rith” New York Times, March 31, 1878.

Bruce Weber, “He Relit Broadway: Gerald Schoenfeld Dies at 84,” New York Times, November
25, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/theater/26schoenfeld.html.

Barbara Gamarekian, “Washington Talk: Career Secretaries; Wielding Power Discreetly,’ New
York Times, May 14, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/14/us/washington-talk-career-
secretaries-wielding-power-discreetly.html.

Jonathan Marshall, Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of
American Democracy: From Truman to Trump, ePub, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, An
imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc, 2021), 245.

Dan E. Moldea, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football, 1st ed
(New York: Morrow, 1989), 93-95, 451 note 8.

E. J. Dionne Jr, “US Envoy Denies Discussing Iran Arms,’ New York Times, December 1, 1986,

v-regan-longtime-new-york-state-comptroller-dies-at-84-.html. E
“Rev. Bruce N. Ritter," Bishop Accountability.org, https://www.bishop-
accountability.org/assign/Ritter_Bruce N_ofm.conv.htm.

Tracy Connor, “Scandal-Scarred Founder of Covenant House Dead at 72,” New York Post,
October 12, 1999, https://nypost.com/1999/10/12/scandal-scarred-founder-of-covenant-
house-dead-at-72/.

Steve Cuozzo, “This NYC Priest's Dramatic Downfall Was Just the Beginning of Perv-Priest

priests-dramatic-downfall-was-just-the-beginning-of-perv-priest-scandals/.

Cuozzo, “Priest's Dramatic Downfall.”

Cuozzo, “Priest's Dramatic Downfall.”

M. A. Farber, “Ritter Inquiry Leading Many To Quit Board,’ New York Times, May 1, 1990,

board.html.
Cuozzo, “Priest’s Dramatic Downfall.”

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59

60

61
62

63
64
65
66
67

68

69
70
71

72
73
74

Anthony Ramirez, “Rev. Bruce Ritter, 72, the Founder of Covenant House for Runaway
Children,” New York Times, October 13, 1999,

covenant-house-for-runaway-children.html.

Kroll Associates’ role is discussed in detail in Peter J. Wosh, Covenant House: Journey of a
Faith-Based Charity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 184-88, 192, 207-
210.

It is also mentioned in New York Magazine. Christopher Byron, “High Spy,’ New York
Magazine, May 13, 1991, 72, https://books.google.cl/books?id=COkCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA72.
“Limited hangout” is intelligence jargon for a form of propaganda in which a selected
portion of a scandal, criminal act, sensitive or classified information, etc. is revealed or
leaked, but avoids telling the whole story. This may be done to establish one’s credibility as
a critic of something or somebody by engaging in criticism of them while, in fact, they are
aiding the covering up by omitting more damaging details. Other motives may include the
intention to distance oneself publicly from something using innocuous or vague criticism
even when ones own sympathies are privately with them; or to divert public attention away
from a more heinous act by leaking information about something less heinous. Byron, “High
Spy,’; Kurt Eichenwald, “Drexel Burnham Fights Back,” New York Times, September 11, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/11/business/drexel-burnham-fights-back.html.

Charles M Sennott, Broken Covenant (New York: Windsor Pub., 1994), 14,
https://archive.org/details/brokencovenantOOsenn.

Cuozzo, “Priest's Dramatic Downfall.”

Ann Marsh, “Americares’ Success Hailed, Criticized,” Hartford Courant, August 10, 1991,
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1991-08-11-0000213209-story.html.
Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Cuozzo, “Priest's Dramatic Downfall.”

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Farber, “Ritter Inquiry.’

Staff, “Rev. Bruce Ritter, 72, Founder of Covenant House, Dies,” Buffalo News, October 12,
1999, https://buffalonews.com/news/rev-bruce-ritter-72-founder-of-covenant-house-
dies/article 5d8b7652-4204-599a-9507-2eefadc9aea6.html.

“Cryptonym: ZRSIGN,” Mary Ferrell Foundation,

C.I.A. Link Charged,’ New York Times, October 22, 1976,
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/10/22/archives/united-fruitcia-link-charged.html.
Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Bill Flood, “Connecticut Reacts to Loss of ‘Native Son, 41st U.S. President George H.W. Bush,’
fox61.com, December 1, 2018,
https://www.fox61.com/article/news/local/outreach/awareness-months/connecticut-
reacts-to-loss-of-native-son-41 st-u-s-president-george-h-w-bush/520-0270014d-288b-
4da7-bd12-3c60188a2a76.

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

#5
76

77

78

79

80

81

82
83
84
85
86

87

88
89
90
91

92
93

94

95
96
97

98

99

Marsh, “Americares’ Success.”

Matthew Phelan, “Seymour Hersh and the Men Who Want Him Committed,” Salon, February
28, 2011, https://www.salon.com/2011/02/28/seymour_hersh_whowhatwhy/.

Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart, “No Accounting for $40 Million in Charity Shipped Over-

million-in-charity-shipped-overseas/2162553/.

Phelan, “Seymour Hersh.”

John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska
(Lincoln, Neb: AWT, 1992), 180.

Deborah Sontag, “L.I. Man Who Runs Home for Boys In Guatemala Is on Trial in Absentia,’

who-runs-home-for-boys-in-guatemala-is-on-trial-in-absentia.html.

Nicholas A. Bryant, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal,
First edition (revised for softcover) (Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2012), 32-33.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 35-36

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 36.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 36-37.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 37-38.

Robert Dorr, “King Donated $25,350 to Aid Lobbying Group,’ Omaha World Herald, May 21,
1989.

For more information see: Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.I. Books, Dec.
1992).

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 37.

Dorr, “King Donated $23,500.’

Dorr, “King Donated $23,500.’

Harry Bernstein, “Former CIA Man Now Battling Unions,’ Los Angeles Times, February 18,
1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-02-18-fi-2605-story.html.

Dorr, “King Donated $23,500.’

Max Fisher, “Letter to Morris Lasker,’ September 28, 1987,

“Wall Street’s Top Earners: Your Pain, Their Gain,’ Forbes, April 15, 2008,
https://www.forbes.com/2008/04/15/paulson-falcone-earners-biz-wall-

czZ_js_041 5wallstreet.html.

Dorr, “King Donated $23,500.’

Dorr, “King Donated $23,500.’

Warwick Middleton, MD, “An Interview with Nick Bryant: Part | - The Franklin Scandal,’

scandal/.

William Robbins, “A Lurid, Mysterious Scandal Begins Taking Shape in Omaha,’ New York
Times, December 18, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/18/us/a-lurid-mysterious-
scandal-begins-taking-shape-in-omaha.html.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 87.

100 Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 98.

101
102
103
104

105
106
107

108
109
110
111

112

113
114
115
116

117
118

119

120

121

122
123
124

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 158.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 158-59.

Robbins, “Scandal in Omaha.’

Patrick Wood, “Flashback - How The Trilateral Commission Converted China Into A
Technocracy,’ Technocracy News, April 22, 2016, https://www.technocracy.news/trilateral-
commission-converted-china-technocracy/.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 280-84.

Phil Gailey, “Have Names, Will Open Right Doors,” New York Times, January 18, 1982,
Gailey, “Have Names.’

Gailey, “Have Names.’

Gailey, “Have Names.’

Lee Siegel, “In Short: Nonfiction,” New York Times, May 21, 1995,
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/21/books/in-short-nonfiction-231795.html.

Jacob Shamsian, “John Glenn Was a Passenger on Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Jet in 1996,
According to Unsealed Flight Records,” Insider, August 9, 2019,

Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, “Power Broker Served Drugs, Sex at Parties Bugged for
Blackmail,’ Washington Times, June 30, 1989, sec. Final.

John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, ePub
(Nebraska: AWT, 1992), 169.

Hedges and Seper, “Power Broker Served Drugs.’

Hedges and Seper, “Power Broker Served Drugs.”

Hedges and Seper, “Power Broker Served Drugs.”

Paul M Rodriguez and George Archibald, “Homosexual Prostitution Inquiry Ensnares VIPs
with Reagan, Bush ‘Call Boys’ Took Midnight Tour of White House,’ Washington Times, June
29, 1989, https://govcrime.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/washington-times-call-boy-article-
1989/.

Jerry Seper and Michael Hedges, “Spence Arrested in N.Y., Released; Once-Host to Powerful
Reduced to Begging, Sleeping in Park,’ Washington Times, August 9, 1989,

to-powerful-reduced-to-begging-sleeping-in-park/.
“What the CIA Tells Congress (Or Doesn't) about Covert Operations: The Barr/Cheney/Bush
Turning Point for CIA Notifications to the Senate,’ NSA Archive, February 7, 2019,

or-doesnt-about-covert-operations-barrcheneybush-turning-point-cia.

Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “CIA Love Traps Lured Diplomats,’ Washington Post,
February 5, 1975, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20Materials/Security-
CIA/CIA%201025.pdf.

Rodriguez and Archibald, “Homosexual Prostitution Inquiry.”

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 293, 295.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 296.

125

126
127
128
129

130

131

132
133
134
135

136
137
138
139

140
141
142
143

Henry W. Vinson, Confessions of a D.C. Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies & Blackmail, First
Edition (Oregon: Trine Day, 2014), 118-19.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 296-300.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 284.

Bryant, Franklin Scandal, 296-97.

“Skybound Business Exec,’ Jet, July 6, 1987, 28, https://books.google.com/books?

id= LEDAAAAMBAJ.

Joseph R Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Wreck of the Penn Central, First edition (Boston:
Little, Brown, and Company, 1971), 202-04,
https://archive.org/details/wreckofpenncentrOOdaug.

“Paul Tibbets: A Rendezvous with History (Part 3),’ Airport Journals, June 1, 2003,

“Paul Tibbets.”

“Paul Tibbets.”

“Paul Tibbets.”

John J. McCloy, chairman of the Rockefeller-dominated Chase Manhattan Bank, became an
‘important financial ally’ of Clint Murchison, Sr., and Sid Richardson when the two Texans
became (through Alleghany Corp.) major stockholders in the New York Central Railroad,
later merged into Penn Central.’ See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
(University of California Press, 1996), 136.

In addition, the founder of Alleghany and the architect of its takeover of New York
Central via the use of Richardson and Murchison as proxies, Robert R. Young, was a client of
the Baird Foundation. “...Mr. Young disclosed that Mr. David G. Baird, ‘a good friend of his,
had approached the [Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad] to sell its Central stock to an investing
group before it sold the block to Messrs. Murchison and Richardson” See: Tax-Exempt
Foundations and Charitable Trusts, Their Impact on Our Economy: United States House
Select Committee on Small Business, 1963, 57-58.

Penn Central money was put into Great Southwest via Penphil, a private investment
operation set up by the railroad’s CFO David Bevan and General Charles J. Hodge, the
railroad’s chief investment officer. See: Associated Press, “$21-Million Fraud.”

“,..control of Great Southwest was tightly centered in the Rockefeller and Wynne
families” See: The Penn Central Failure and the Role of Financial Institutions: Staff Report of
the Committee on Banking and Currency, 1970, 30.

Scott, Deep Politics, 284.

Daughen and Blinzen, The Wreck of Penn Central, 161.

“Paul Tibbets.”

The Associated Press, “$21-Million Fraud Al Penn Central Is Charged to 3,” New York Times,
January 5, 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/01/05/archives/2 1 million-fraud-at-penn-
central-is-charged-to-3-bevan-exfinance.html.

AP, “S$21-Million Fraud.”

“Paul Tibbets.”

Daughen and Blinzen, The Wreck of Penn Central, 176.

Michael C. Jensen, “Pennsy Is Scored in a House Report,’ New York Times, December 21,

jet-aviation-units-history.html.

144
145
146

147
148

149
150
151

152

153

154

155

156

Daughen and Blinzen, The Wreck of Penn Central, 204.

Jensen, “Pennsy is Scored.”

Robert J Cole, “Saul Steinberg: Gunning for Penn Central,” New York Times, November 11,
1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/11/archives/saul-steinberg-gunning-for-penn-
central.html.

Cole, “Saul Steinberg.”

Daniel F. Cuff, “Business People; Lindner Chairman of Penn Central,” New York Times, May 20,

of-penn-central.html.

Hilary Rosenberg, The Vulture Investors (New York: J. Wiley, 2000), 12.

Cuff, “Business People.”

For DeVoe’s relationship to Ocean Reef, see: Organized Crime and Cocaine Trafficking Record
of Hearing IV, President’s Commission on Organized Crime, November 27-29, 1984,

trafficking. Additional corroboration can be found in Scott, Deep Politics, 335.

“How Richard Santulli Became The Father of Fractional Ownership,’ International Aviation
HQ, January 26, 2022, https://internationalaviationhg.com/2022/01/26/richard-santulli-
netjets/.

“Skybound Business Exec,’ Jet.

Eric Black, LinkedIn, Accessed June 28, 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-black-
660a01126/details/experience/.

Mike Crater, LinkedIn, Accessed June 28, 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-crater-
2aa9316/.

“Cargo Service Targets City - Polar Plans to Land Weekly Flights at Rickenbacker Starting
Sunday,’ Columbus Dispatch, May 12, 1993,
https://dispatch.newsbank.com/doc/news/10EOD9C54B7D92F8.

DOCUMENTS

UNCLASSIFIED s

1 document at the presert time, does this cause you to

: recall thac any of these satters vere discussed by

3 Studley with the Director at that December 20 meeting,

4 nanely the idea of creating a circular arrangement in

5 which a trading company would be established to supply

é freedos fighter mevamenta which Congress was urwilling te
7 support for one reason or another and that Israel would

E sell certain things, military equipnent, to the Fecple's
$ Republic of China, tho vould supply the Goviet arms,

10 vhich would then ke brokered to the freedom fighters, and
11 that Israel would be benefitted by the United States '
12 through a high technology support or other compensation?
13 Do you recall anything?
14 A What's the question?
as ? Well, the question is vere the matters that I
16 have juek described diecueeed by Studley at that seatirg?
17 A To the best of my knowledge, they were rot,
16 no.
as R Do ycu recall the sane day as the meeting with
20 Studley that the Director called Richard Secord for è

21 neating?
aa A No, I con't.

23 Q Let ne ehov you a docunent which ve've baen
24 provided by the CIA, vhich ve are informed is a sunmary
25 of the Director's meeting log and telephone log vith

UNCLASSIFIED

Document 1: GeoMiliTech’s circular trading arrangement with, the US,
Israel and China.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/
Report of the Congressional Committees |/H8S6dilhvqp8C?hl=en

UNCLASSIFIED «sas resor u 5815

Document 2: Schematic of the circular trading agreement

CONTINUATION OF INTERVIIN OP NANCY MORABTA PAGE h

to Europe again and was joined there by her son, MARC who resides
im London. Topether they went with ME. ZOCKER and his family to
the opera festival in varoma, Italy. ‘There they were joined by
ROLAND FARINA (ZUCKER's administration assistant) and his family,

. ee A glee pan a aA
time a s to Trade Development Bank, Geneva,
e a Ea. Sich Gh out tue tap an UTLI o lee (whieh is

sometime in 1966. During the latter part of 2904 or early 1985
received e call from ZUCKER whe needed funds of $20,000 or so
Roney

|
;
i
:

Document 3: Section of the Nan Morabia FBI 302 that discusses
Edmond Safra.
https://archive.org/details/FBI302NanMorabia1/mode/1up?
view=theater

¿203 ALBERT KIN
LEDGER FRON UI G1 BA TO OL 12 86

AIC. NAME k DERCRIPTIUON DOG NO CONTRA
S6OB00t HYDE Pars SaunRE (su1TE>
310 IWT ON CRM, tanaw
ó 18 ONPERCIM TuLin omigyi
6 10 ARTRO JOIE GUT PORRAS 48430)
6 10 TOD GENEVE SME CURP > 426901
6 10 Om CwMGES S 640801
6 10 BANK CHASES = AOA
6 19 Da Orasis #0401
6 10 BAM CHARGES COMPLT eUt:
b 10 RAM CHARGES CONPLT = ATTI
A 10 JILA K. LAKARI otardi
a 10 COE SERU FLO, Inv crm wR 309 PATT
B 10 CHE SERV FID. ALROLEAGIES BFR B74 440501
a 10 Bare CHeRGES 404.00
8 10 FRON Che vecatat
10 10 INTEREST OW CMLL 71040:
14 12 OWSA AR s 0201
Ye 10 ihr CHAAUES 240K 1
14 12 KE LMRARtEATEENT Cor TETT
16 10 REINALRASEMEONT csr oom
15 18 CIE SERV. FIG. REPwT case AN ETT
15 18 BE Ciamces oun
17 10 INTEREST . Treen
20 12 FROM OALA. seoetat
20 18 TO MODO Evan 604504
20 10 hoe Cweten bA DDI
22 10 C.S.P. REY ALIOELAS INS SPR 3060 6owyar
(22 10 C.8.F. REMBT PRELEVT CASH sazo)
è? 1D Bee Camoth 440401
22 10 CMECK Tom Gronen ons7ur
ZE 10 BA CWARGEÒ Uy
27 10 wimb Cab HOBART DUT LOK eure
27 10 Cle Stivvy Fif MENT CADH An aiarel
27 10 DANE CHARGES 04 W401
27 10 SERFID AAMOT SFR T03 (WION PRAAK sazo
27 10 MYELIN © LEB PETT
Z6 10 TRANSFER TO DOLAY 5603001

Document 4: An Enterprise ledger that mentions Aeroleasing.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?do-cld=146470#relPage -
Id=325&search=Aerole-asing

South Ken . Air Hansen l 718 383 9985 Penelope Foy OHL Gourier

0207-7416212 fess 5 en EREE Earne Bery- 800-225-5345

Te Home Office : Flight Options o,
-2732 can Airlines 0160 Curtiss y
; sate
SWITZERLAND yamg Sma EG
-l LAAN AA Frequent 71638188 Flyaway
Brital Hotel i rf T Brenda Boone : 081-759 1557/2020
ne ito,
1201 26 7710 Susan Michada Mi- i d Tickets
i ; 9 1 19 Main Street, Ke Freque ent nt Flyer Glubs
“42 Paris
fentacte Express : eket PERK Ry E r A
The Corvegila Club 360-25 Membership Re- tt ishor) Susie Si- ber
040 41 8234854 Amad A iz 286-0028 (Wiipon} Michact
. T pea : i Garnero, Jr., Mario B.
The Steffani : f 41 55 11 9970 1020
010 41.82 22101 ‘ Continental a E
AT&T 00) O SEE ATON ait lier number, oft 331 #20 $6 ‘pore
TRAVEL (T) 1-400-225-5288 (

Helico ters a

Aero Leasing British Airways Delta Airlines
(PIATI Zurich, TTEA BOB Bante renon figg meet
9108803 25-1999 Fiigh! information

ap 1600289 tequent fier mumbar : ma H
; i :

Air France
820 & A

GN > ;
1-800-636-7735

=

Document 5: The same Aeroleasing appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book.

- d > = =

b — o atan = i p -s -~ — .
WERD inb = =p = l CANN- -
BI 173-13-16—- Btw oleae a a shi
ea ta a Pa ee elated aA Oe GRR, r A ewe
= . othe oot. a See malin ota re papam > Diin Se EO

a William F, weld
/ United States Attorney

1107 McCormack Post Office and Courthouse
Boston, Masaachosetts 62106

= Dear Mr. Weld: _ je anie Selon Seana

As agreed Messrs. Manichur Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi,
and Richard Arcmitace will broker the transaction of Promise
software to Sheik Blahid bin Mahfoar for resale and general
éistribution as gifts in his region ee upon-the three .:
comfitions we last spoke of. Promise must have a soft arrival, ’
te papervork, customs, or elay. Tt must be equipped vith the

special data cetrieval unit. As before, you must walk tho
financial aspects througs Credit Suisse into National Commercial
fank, If you encounter arty problame contact mo Airactly.

assistant Attorney
Civil Rights Division

Document 6: Letter to William Weld from Assistant Attorney
General Bradford Reynolds detailing the sale of PROMIS for
financial purposes to Sheik Klahid bin Mahfouz and how
Manucher Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi and Richard
Armitage were to broker the deal.

yT 1

FO-36 (Rev, 8-28-82) a 3 r
° Fels *

TRANSMIT VIA: PRECEDENCE: CLASSIFICATION:
D Teletype O Immediate D TOP SECRET
O Facsimile O Priority O SECRET. .
O AIRTEL Routine DO CONFIDENTIAL
T oe O UNCLASE” TO
Pairs 6/29/84

mos gac sax p¥lycrsco Is)
Ate —
SUBJECT: /ROBERT- MAXWELL, Dba ~-
5

erganon International;

J
. fe
This entire communication is classified "SEMMET."

Re Albuquerque airtel dated 6/13/84.

San Francisco indices negative regarding Pergamon
International and ROBERT MAXWELL. The follo
information obtained from San Francisco f
regardin NFORMATION

-» 2112 Berkeley Way, Berkele c came to the
attention sr the Sat Francisco ae On es, SUE RUGGE,

President, INFORMATION ON DEMAND was interviewed at her place
of business. RUGGE described her company as an information
and research services which provides a full range of infor-
mation gatherings for a spectrum of clients worldwide for
Such areas as agriculture and nutrition, bibliography books,
memographs, periodicals, business, economics, chemistry,
current affairs, directories, education, energy, environ-
ment, foundations, grants, law, government, medicine,
biosciences, patents, s¢jence and technology, social
science and Tamai,

Š
RY
(2)- Bureau (RM) Q
- Albuquerque Eiosc-3262 (RM),

1 - San Francisco

it y1 L

Transmitted o Per
(Number) (Time) Wie.

Mm RT al

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

~ en =
kI

RUCCE advised that INFORMATION ON DEMAND's (IOD)
Sources include over 250 computer data bases which provide
information in two main categories, research and document
delivery. we:

According to RUGGZ, all data basee that IOD has
access to provide only public source information and nothing
~ef a known or sensitively classified nature. She explained
that it is a data base called the Defenes Technical Center
which fs connected to the Departucut of Defense (DOD) which
contains classified information, however, IOD has no Password
for access and further no need for access.

ræ

RUGGE advised that requests of IOD are approximately
507 business related ard 40% technical and medicine releted,
She advised that IOD taps most publicly available computerized
data bases including Leckheed's Dialog, System Developnent
Corporation's Orbit, the New York Tines Information Bank,
the National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS, and the Biblio-
graphic Retrieval Service.

Relative to research, RUGGE advised thet IOD provides
information to the business, technical, end Professional
communities, as well as to individuels. According to RUGGE,
IOD can locate single facts as well as provice answers to
complex questions dealing with such areas as conprehensive
marketing research, custon date Suncaries, sophisticated
literature searching, current ewareress service, and global
iafcrmation capability.

Relative to document delivery, RUGGE adyfsec that LOD
locates photocopies cr acquires published trfornatian fn any
form, whether they are aanuals, conference Papers, patents,
or theses, as well as reports, catalogues, brochures, articles,
etc. She adyiged that requests are received at TOD by tele-
Phone, mail, and electronically, and that infornation ig sent
to clients by the same means,

RUCGE advised that under the lav and government
heading, IOD has access to the American Statistics Index
CASI) and Congressional Informatton Serytre CCIs}, the
Commerce Businesa Daily, the Congressional’Record Abstracts,
the Criminal Justice Periodtcal Fudex, the Federal Index,

$ Dj L-E T

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

11 inf
(Sy aaie ce tha

or D

the Federal Register Abstracts, Labor Law, Illegal Resource
Index, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service
(NCJRS), the State Publications Index, the U. S. Government
Contact Awards HRRCE» and Votes. (s)

According to RUGGE, o a)
Been a client of [TOD for at least ™en years and it would

has
be impossible to recall all the information requested by
them, except for the last year, as recorde are not kept
beyond that period.

now if

genuine w

perate with the FBI aia te to provide the FEI '
b1 relative to requests

during the last year.

Additionall adv

(Suture request by the vas deemed

Maappropriate by the
that order. kRUGG
h

RUCGE present

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

° * |
j l \. L „TED STATES GOVERNMENT

Velo memorandum

cart: 6/26/84 bi a
s) bl
Se =o gt)

—_—

) sb

artnor: SAC, NEWARK
CG
B m

sumecer, RO T

DIRECTOR, FBI

This comnunication is classified Pheer in its
entirety.

i!

A 4 (t “jf r
Re: Albuquerque airtel to the Buléan, 6/13/8

pit- New indices negative regarding "Information o
Demand PERGAMON INT'L. There are numerou
referen LL, especially with middle initib

however, no identification can be made without additional
Gata.

Additionally, New Jersey county telephone
directories covering a 100 mile radius of New York City
were reviewed for PERGAMON INT'L with negative results.

— —____. -a
12 JUN 29 1964

Gppureau

2-Albuquercue
sNewerk ~ FD eren By.

E her “5 (
pe DECLAcSiF t ON:

ie Sn
TAN at OPTIONAL FORM NO. It
joes (REV. 1-40)
Ciosi: GRA FP Mm (AI Crm) Tort! S
CON AT annarnMey E.

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Infarmatinn an Namand ohtained via FOIA hv Rill Hamilton

ryan

SAP UNE PRUE NEUE PRAM ENED NET REE AAE INS ORF RRAEE PMN WERE FONE Ly REET PRAT ES EEER NE

“FDA “ev, 8-24.22)
oe

T 9

« TRANSMIT VIA: : PRECEDENCE: CLASSIFICATION:
O Teletype O Immediate O TOP SECRET
O Facsimile O Priority D SECRET
44 AIRTEL č č - D Routine D CONFIDENTIAL g

O UNCLASEFTO
O UNCLAS
Date __ 6/13/04

TO: DIRECTOR, FBI

u)
FROM: SAC, ALBUQUERQUE (G osc-3262)) P Pd

SUBJECT: ROBERT

ternational

buquergue )

KS This communication is classified "Saket" in its
> entirety,

The following information was provided b; FK.
Paa + +> of whom work at Sandia Nationa Í

E
4

Laboratories, a rque, New Mexico, in the area of Technology |
198448 fe These individuals provided the information on June L;
1984 h

(They stated there is a firm known “Sy famtorpas-ion on %
Demand, Inc., located at 2112 Berkeley tay, AOR Cali forms eK sy

to neyt,

A

G>) Bureau

2 = New York

2 - Newark DE-24
2 =- San Francisco “
2 Albucuerque

BLL rongan postate

prane t kira Pega E J

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

th
a

-< bl

SECRET 5
ng [iose-3262] yy) LA

un, with Telephones (415) 644-4500 and (800) 227-0750. The

resident of this firm is a woman known as S UGGE. The nature of
this firm is that it is a firm which has compiled data base information
and for a fee will provide them to customers. The data base information
relates to a wide variety and to the best of their knowledge is not
classified in any manner. However, it includes information concerning

government a various available means of tapping government information
data bases. ane information provided by the Sandia employees was x
received fr6m employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) and
has to do with the purchase of Information On Demand, Inc., by one
ROBERT MAXWELL, the ‘owner of Pergamon International, a British

information firr i A

br p3 po NSA
he information received from these Sandia employees is

computerize ata bases on beha ovietyy

2 bi b> p NS
Albuquerque indices are negative regarding Pergamon
International, ROBERT MAXWELL, Information On Demand, Inc

BIC
According to the Sandia employees, there is a New Jersey
Pergamon International Office; however, they did not know where it
was located w i s
LEADS
NEW YORK CITY DIVISION

AT NEW YORK CITY, NEV YORK

Search indices regarding Pergamon International, ROBERT
MAXWELL, Information On Deman¢, inc a He

NEWARK DIVISION

AT NEWARK ,NEW JERSEY

Will check indices as set forth for New York Office.

kB.
€E
a re

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

= Yo . Ee
l N ig

(s

NU

+

v r Ye nein TOL es. §
WiNERUISE

7/29/84 : s% ROUTINE

*FLYSERR SF AQIDE He AOL43 $ADYSIR 1920332 JUL 8&4

FN DIRECTOR FBI ga) pe
T0 FBI ALBUQUERQUE L0SC-32b2)] ROUTINE
FBI SAN FRANCISCO ROUTINE

ET l

SECRET l

/ z. eh

ROBERT MAXWELL DBA PERGAMON INTERNATIONALS QI 00 : ALBUQUERQUE

THIS COMMUNICATION IS CLASSIFIED "SAMRET" IN ITS ENTIRETY.

RE ALBUQUERQUE AIRTEL TO FBIH@ JUNE"L3, L984. 5)

SF DIVISION CONDUCTED A bl

ON DEMAND INC., 2112 BERKELEY YAY, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, FROM

WHEN IT WAS PLACED -IN A
CLOSED status. & bi

SF PROVIDED PERTINENT INFORMATION REGARDING INVESTIGATION

OF INFORMATION ON DEMAND INC. 10 ALBUQUERQUE VIA SF AIRTEL DATED
JUNE 29, 1984.

munon conato — WIL
epee EITS

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert

Mawvwall and Infarmatian an Namane ahtainad via CAIA hu Rill Uamiltan

WIGAVWVTIE AHU MUVYNHAUVH YN VGA; VLAN ISTU Vid PWN Wy DIN TIANYI

5

PAGE THREE C È bi

NOTE:

ALBUGUERQUE DIVISION RECEIVED INFORMACION FRON Two
EMPLOYEES OF SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES OF: ALBUQUERQUE, Notes
THAT A COMPANY NAMED INFORMATION ON DEMAND HAD BEEN PURCHASED
BY A ROBERT MAXWELL. OWNER OF PERGAMON INTERNATIONAL. A BRITISH
TUO EMPLOYEES ADVISED THEY HAD LEARNED

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

. —~- .
if

Fo36 (Rev. 6-26-82) 3 ag)

FBI `
TRANSMIT VIA: PRECEDENCE: CLASSIFICATION: pie
DO Teletype O Immediate O TOP SECRET 4
D Facsimile D Priority © SECRET
(4 Airtel O Routine O CONFIDENTIAL
O UNCLASEFTO
O UNCLAS
Date 8/9/84

DIRECTOR, FEI

sor, on ror GS

SUBJECT: ROBERT MAXWELL dha

“are

This communication is classified "Se@fet” in its entirety.

ReAQairtel, dated 6/13/84.

The NYO indices contains no record identifiable with
nternational, ROBERT MAXWELL, Information on Demand, Inc.
based upon available information. j |
Ad
This case is being placed in an RUC status. T f | I
i
7 |

kw)

Bureau (RM)
2- Albuquergue (rosc-3z62} [| RM) (s
l- New York

ALL IMEOROATION co: ATASE
aP wt Tur i “5

“Transmitted J
(Number) (Time)

.mve t:

Document 7: Pages 13- 34 of | FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert

Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

pis

Eer-
$.

e
) 9
FOS36 (Rev. 8-26-32]
- FBI
TRANSMIT VIA; PRECEDENCE: CLASSIFICATION:
D Te'etype D Immediate O TOP SECRET
0 Facsimile DO Priority O SECRET
a See D Routina \ © CONFIDENTIAL
I. O UNCLAS EF TO
i |- ) n eet

Date

TO: DIRECTOR, FBI PD)

FROM; SAC, ALBUQUERQUE (205c-3262)) G
N

SUBJECT: ROBERT MAXWELL

g p International
bI

A quercue

This communication is classified "Sekret" i
entirety. x.
ae

ReButel, dated 7/19/84.

$ On 8/13/84 andia National bC-
Laboratories, Albuquerque, , one oF individuals who oricinally
broucht this information to the attention of the FBI, and the fact
that NSA might wish to establish liaison with the Bureau in this
matter, indicated that he had no further word from NSA. ie (S} wh
— 3
-+

. k
| S2CRE7 ee lar
le Yep 2 se &

- Bureau
l - Albu ucrque

Approved
(Time)
5
a ae VÀ
IES ASATIOR Cl3v ere pa a ANN ye Pilpan ot

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert

Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

e rather non-speci es)
that it was current information.

It was the speculation shown during the course of the conversation
that this might be dated info ti
concernin

bl-
Until such time as NSA re-establishes contact and expresses
further interest in this matter, Albuquerque is taking no further
action and this matter is being placed in a closed status.

The personnel at Sandie National Laboratories were tolg
that if NSA has a desire to establish contact with the FBI in this
matter, a logical step would be to contact FBIHQ and pursue it through

that channel. There is a chance they will come to Albuquerque in :
September and possibly they may be in touch with FBI, Albuquerque. u
If this occurs, FBIHO will be apprised of any pertinent data received.)

e

PAGE TUO DE H@ 0143

3) kì

¢ By: sXe: DECL:DADR

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

AQ Qosc-3262] qw)

SAN FRANCISCO DIVISION
AT SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Will search indices as set forth for New York Office.

REQUEST OF THE BUREAU

Requested to search indices regarding the firms and
individuals as set forth in the New York lead. ‘

= 3% =

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

J * &. * 9

4:22 (Rev. 7-1-83) XY

J -
* (FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Fievords/Operations Sections

O Name Seerching Unit, 4543, TL 115

O Special File Room, 5991, TL¥ 122

Ba amaa ye
Type of Search Requested: (Check One)
O Restricted Search (Active Index - 5 & 20)

O Restricted Search (Active & Inactive Index - 5 & 30)

Q Unrestricted (Active & Inactive Index)
Pen ea tha | ñC
Special Instructions: (Check One)

All References (Socurity & Criminal)

© Security Search

O Criminal Search

D Mann References Only r

O Exact Name Only (On the Nose)

C Buildup O Variations

O Restricted to Locality of
Subject
Birthdate & Place Zn
Address ee es

a
Localities
Searcher

RY pate 4S mias ©
Prod.

FILE NUMBER

iz- fvyo —

erreecsfAaneo.
CCU. VL DOOL ae

65 -t7BSF-
-b
-TE

SSO @.0

JJO

t

H

Za (CB LT '
Aa. a Aan f? P p. i "

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

. ee r . f
4:22 (Rev. 7-1.83) e =) $ : O

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

Records’ Operations Sections
x oH
O Name Searching Unit, 4543, TLE 115
(5 gonice niitit TRAS,
D Special File Room, 5991, TU 122 pe
O Forward to rt

» Room,
Type of Search Requested: (Chack One)
Æ Restricted Search (Active Index - § & 20)
O Restricted Search (Active & inactive Index + § & 30)
© Unrestricted (Active & Inactive Index) -~
Special instructions: (Check One)
- & At References (Security & Criminal)
D Security Search i
D Criminal Soarch
DO Main a aaae Referees Only i
O Exact Name Only (On the Nose)
O Buildy D Variations

Address __
m eee
Localities
Searcher.
Ra Date CLOC nias “FL?

Proc

CCCT 5 @@050)80
~“CCCCOSIDOD) IOS

Same em edi eet Pate MeL we
nn a7 Mowe Ee 24 -L PHI! 2... neste endian on eee. fab. .

vocument /: rages 135-54 OF FBI Invesugation recoras OF tne invesugation INTO KODET
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

4-22 (Rev. 7-1-B3} x } s f B

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Records/Operations Sections

Fi). en

O Name Searching Unit, 4543, TU 115

C Special Fie Room, 5991, u ies & “i. aL p

C Foward to

Type of Search Requested: (Chock One)

O Restricted Search (Active Index - 5 & 20)

QO) Restricted Search (Active & Inactive Index - 5 & 30)
E Unvestrictad (Active & Inactive Index)
Special instructions: (Check One)

EI Ail References (Security & Criminal)

O Security Search

D Criminal Search

O Manus References Only j
O Exact Name Only (On the Nose)
O Buildup D Veriations Xu)

Localities
Searcher _
R# Date ENE Initials LZ”

FILE NUMBER SERIAL

ATAINED j
) SER

= TET,

u

pease’

Wits
Cizesiied
Dectssalfy

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

San Francisce taking no further action.

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

“4-759 (Rev. 12-14-88) XXXKKX

Ty Ch SOKO

i XXXXXX
- FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

FOIPA DELETED PAGE INFORMATION SHEET

= 42 Page(s) withheld entirely at this location in the file. One or more of the following
statements, where indicated, explain this deletion.
O Deletions were made pursuant to the exemptions indicated below with no segregable materia)
available for release to you.

Section 552 Section 552a

O (b)(1) i I aA) D (4X5)
D (b)(2) O (XB) O GN)
O (b83) O (eye) O (kx!)

O (bX7XD) O (k)(2)

O (bX7XE) O (X3)

O OXF) D (kha)
O (X4) O (b)(8) O (ks)
O (bs) O (b9) O (k6)
O (b6) D (k)(7)

C) Information pertained only to a third party with no reference to you or the subjeci of your
request,

O Information pertained only to a third party. Your name is listed in the title only.

R) Documents originated with another Government agency(ies). These documents were referred
to that agency(ies} for review and direct response to you.

Pages contain information furnished by another Government agency(ies). You will be
advised Dy the FBI as to the releasability of this information following our consultation
with the other agencyfies).

Page(s) withheld for the following reason(s): .

—
—_—_— oor — —
rr

(8 The following number is to be used for reference regarding these pages:

lbI Ts RTW i a a aa aaa

© For your information:

XXXKKXXXXXXKXKXXXXXXXX
X DELETED PAGE(S) X
IOXXXKX X NO DUPLICATION FEE X
XXXXKX X FOR THIS PAGE x
+ XXXXXX XXKIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

FBI/DOJ

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

: 4-750 (Rer. 12-14-88) Fas 9 LOOX

-

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FOIPA DELETED PAGE INFORMATION SHEET

—__. Page(s) withheld entirely at this location in the file. One or more of the following
Statements, where indicated, explain this deletion.

O Deletions were made pursuant to the exemptions indicated below with no segregable material
available for release to you.

0 X) D (b\(7XA) O (axs)
C) (b2) O (XE) D 0X2)
O (b3) O (bX7XC) D X1)
O (bX7XD) O (KX2)
O (bWXE) O (kX3)
O XF) O kia)
D (b4) O (b8) D (k5)
O (X5) O (X9) O (kX6)
O (bX6) D (kX7)

O Information pertained only to a third party with no reference to you or the subject of your
request

O Information pertained Only 10 a third party. Your name is listed in the title only.

O Documenis originated with another Government ageneyties).. These cocuments were referred
to that agency(ies) for review and direct response to you.

Pages contain information furnished by another Government agency(ies). You will be
advised by the FB] as to the releasability of this information following our consultation
with the other agency(ies),
Page(s) withheld for the following reason(s): :
ee es
K For your information: aih db la arenan ic edi phe

ΠThe following number is to be used for reference regarding -these pages:

a E a IEN F E L I P

60.0 000.09.0.000.0605.0.0.0.0.0.4
X DELETED PAGE(S) X
SOOO X NO DUPLICATION FEE X
XXXXXX X FOR THIS PAGE X
XXXXXX XXCCOOCOCOCOOOOOCOOKXK

FBI/DOJ

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

neah (Rev. 12-14-88) . g vy

S FEDERAL BUREAU OF INYESTIGATION
FOIPA DELETED PAGE INFORMATION SHEET

s28 Page(s) withheld entirely at this location in the file. One or more of the following
statements, where indicated, explain this deletion.

O Deletions were made pursuant to the exemptions indicated below with no Scgregable material
available for release to you.

cti ion a
O bU) D (bOXA) O (a3)
O (b){2) O (b)0XB) D (x2)
O (bX3) O (XXO) D u)
O (bXOXD) O (x2)
O OXE) D (kX3)
O OXF) D X4)
O (bx4) O (bX8) O (kys)
O (X5) O (X9) O (kX6)
O (b6) O (X7)

O Information pertained only to a third party with no reference to you or the subject of your
request

O Information pertained only to a third party. Your name is listed in the title oaly.

Documents originated with another Government agency(ies). These documents were referred
to that agency({ies) for review and direct response to you.

Pages contain information furnished by another Governmen: agency(ies). You will be
advised by the FB] as to the releasability of this information following our consultation
with the other agency(ies).

Page(s) withheld for the following reason(s): i
EAE
eee
D For your information:
aaa
eee

D The following number is to be used for reference regarding: these pages:

-HQ - /00274) - 3
XOXKXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
X DELETED PAGE(S) X
XXXXXX X NO DUPLICATION FEE X
XXXXXX X FOR THIS PAGE X
DONX KOXNCOAXXXXXXXXXKXXXXX

FBI/DOJ

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert
Maxwell and Information on Demand, obtained via FOIA by Bill Hamilton.

ep were ee

; : kòy a3 ce
xi SPER Bha OR y" lene "m

sP =

Weshington, D.C. 20535
cf

Rut H H ROBE XRELL

Captioned individual, who you advised was born

Q 1923, may be Sse se born
pie : 7 in grechasTozakia, © was e subje É a

vV igation by the roa 1953 - 1961. Attached
are eight memoranda and ten reports concerning this
investigation. gmw OS -A5 66 3

Maxwell was the President of the "Pergamon Press,”
which had its headquarters in London, England. There is
attached a a and memorandum concerning "Pergamon

J s
Press, AE 6725F

In addition, in 1974 information was received that
Robert Maxwell was one of the defendants in a civil suit
against Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corporation.
Attache is a copy of an indictment, newspaper article and-a
memorandum concerning this matter. (U) PETET SI Ea

z
E
Jaa

\

The central files at FBI Headquarters, the records
of the Identification Division and appropriate computer data
bases contain no additional pertinent information identifiable
with the captioned individual based upon background
os information furnished in connection with this name check

request., (U) i

9 ey Aa
3

— ‘
m7!
c9 ce
a o
o

w =
a ece

Enclosures 23

JAC- I) SAGOR

seger MATERIAL ATTACHED =- Lgl? É
Cases ES b3 7 3 g
3 Declagšify onr | ADR ;
sager ge —!

)- ENCI OSURE

4371

On me mee =

the President, at the White House. (SP)
: Barre TI
AnD. DISSES TAN,

: Er Bicentennial of the United States Constitution (1787-1987) OY 0 taa
`» PE Pa |
MAIL ROOM SO

E: Per request from Arthur B, Culvahouse, Jr., Counsel to
SEE REVERSE SIDE FOR 5 ET.

Document 7: Pages 13-34 of FBI investigation records of the investigation into Robert

mbeninad asin COA bas Dill Lin mailban

AAarnirall aad Inf nun ntinw an Manianal

WIGAWEI GNU MHONT TAUVHN UN VENAN, UULAlIIeU Vid FWIA Uy DIN MAN MRLOIH.

A Purteershiy birg Boston
Profsssiont] Corporations Chikago
1850 K Street N.W. Los Angelei
Washington, DC 20004-2254 Miami
203-887-8000 Newport Beach
Focstslle 202-778 5967 New York
Tallinn (Estonia)
Vilius
Washington, D.C.
MCDERMOTT, WILL & EMERY receded i a a cal te
Incuding the practice formerly cried on by Ler, Toomey & Kent 302-778-8030 Pada

March 14, 1994

John C, Dwyer, Esq.

Assistant Associate Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice

10th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530

Dear Mr. Dwyer:

This is a follow-up letter to the zeeting at my office on
Tuesday morning, March 1, 1994 between ny clients, William and
Nancy Hamilton of INSLAW, myself, Mr. Stephen Zipperstein,
First Assistant U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles, FBI Special

Agent Scott Erskine, and my co-counsel, Michael Priedlander and
Philip Kellogg.

You explained at the outset of the neeting that Messrs.
Zipperstein and Erskine are reviewing the death of
investigative journalist, Danny Casolaro, as part of the
Justice Departnent's review of the June 1993 investigative
report on INSLAW by its Special Counsel, Nicholas J. Bua.

We regard as significant the confirmation from Special
Agent Erskine during the meeting that a maid at the Sheraton
Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginie, had seen a mean leave Mr.
Casolaro's hotel roon the Saturday morning of the death.
According to Special Agent Erskine, the local police took a
statement from the hotel maid in which she gave an eyewitness
description of the man she sav leaving the roon.

“It is ovr understanding that the description is as
follows:

A male in his 30's, with an excellent sun tan,
wearing a fashionable tee-shirt, dark slacks,
.and deck shoes.

We recall press accounts of Mr. Casolare's death, which
describe him waiting in the hotel bar on Thursday evening for a
dark-skinned nan. Could that have been the same man whom the

Document 8: A letter from Inslaw Inc's lawyer Charles Work to Assistant Associate Attor-
ney General John C. Dwyer regarding the circumstances around the death of journalist
Danny Casolaro, March 1994.

John C. Dwyer, Esq.
March 14, 1994
Page 2

maid saw leaving Mr. Casolaro's room Saturday morning and whom
She describes as having "an excellent sun tan"?

I will now deal with the answers to the several requests
to INSLAW for information that were made during the meeting.

Mr. Zipperstein raised the question of whether any of
INSLAW's confidential sources hava alleged that Mr. Casolaro
was drugged before he was allegedly murdered. As Mr. Hamilton
replied, INSLAW was told by one confidential source that a drug
known as ethyl alcohol absolut was administered to Mr. Casolaro
before he was allegedly killed. This source told INSLAW that
the drug was administered by injection into the area just above
Mr. Casolaro's spine in order to deaden the nerves below his
head. INSLAW was also told that the inventory lot number for
the drug administered to Mr. Casolaro was 6810-00-242-3645 and
the composition code was ACS-C2-HS50H-FW-46 IGL SA-C-11~-84.

A forensic pathologist, Dr. Kit Green, who worked at the
CIA for 16 years, claims that the alleged inventory lot number
indicates that the drug cane from a U.S. Arny inventory. Dr.

Creen's address is 1409 Cedar Bend, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48013.

Attachment A is a copy of the 27-pace computer printout
labelled “Criminal Division Vendor List." A procurement
official for the Justice Department, in response to a question
from a fact checker for a national magazine, acknowledged that
this list is from the Criminal Division and that a special
security clearance is normally required to gain access to it,
Upon information end belie?, this is a list of commercial
organizations that serve as "cutouts" for the Justice
Department's own covert intelligence agency, i.e., for the
Criminal Division's office of Special Investigations (OSI). As
noted in the February 14, 1994 Addendum, a prelininary analysis
has produced information consistent with these clains.

Attachment 3 is a set of documents relating to Mr. George
Pender. Mr. Casolaro had described Mr. Pender to ny client as
a Los Angeles businessman to whom both Earl Brian and Peter
Videnieks effectively reported in connection with the
dissenination of stolen copies of the PROMIS softvare to
intelligence entities, As Mr. Hamilton explained during the
meeting, Mr. Casolaro, in the final several weeks of his life,
confirmed to Mr. Hamilton that he was planning to visit a
sensitive facility in Washington, D.C. that Mr. Casolaro said
was associated with Mr. Pender. Mr. Hamilton had conveyed to
Mr. Casolaro a warning forn Mr. Charles Hayes not to visit the
facility in question because it could result in Mr. Casolaro's
death. According to INSLAW sources, the facility in question

Document 8: A letter from Inslaw Inc's lawyer Charles Work to Assistant Associate Attor-
ney General John C. Dwyer regarding the circumstances around the death of journalist
Danny Casolaro, March 1994.

John C. Dwyer, Esq.
March 14, 1994
Page 3

is a four story townhouse on Jackson Place just behind Blair
House that was used for White House “dirty tricks" during the
Reagan and Bush Administrations, that was staffed by ex-CIA
employees and thet was equipped with computer equipment and
crypto communications devices used to access very sensitive
U.S. Government intelligence, law enforcament and national
security databases on American citizens,

At Mr. Zipperstein's request, INSTAW agreed to make
additional inquiries about whether any of its confidential
sources, in the Justice Departzent, U.S. intelligence agencies
or elsewhere, would agree to speak with Mr. Zipperstein about
anything they claia to know about Mr. Casolaro's death.

We are, of course, aware that Mr. Zipperstein served one
or more tours of duty in the Justice Department's Criminal
Division. You know from our meeting with you on December 16,
1993 and from earlier written submissions about the INSLAW
case, how concerned we are about having any career Criminal

Division lawyer included in any sensitive aspect of the Justice
Depertment's review of the INSLAW affair.

Wa have explained more than once that aost of our sources
refuse to believe that the Justice Department can effectively
investigate itself. It is even nore difficult to persuade our
sources to meet with an attorney who was recently part of the
Criminal Division, which, we have been told, was the nerve
center for the malfeasance against INSLAW.

It would help us to persuade our sources to come forvard
if: we knew sore about Mr. Zipperstein's service in the
Department, and if wa could argue that his contacts with
persons involved in the INSLAW matter were relatively miniral,
The following information would be helpful: {12) What were the
dates and associated duties of the various periods of Xr.
Zipperstein's service in the Justice Department's Criminal
Division; (2) What are the dates and associated duties of the
various periods of Mr. Zipperstein's service in the U.S.
Attorney's Office for Los angeles; (3) What involvement, if
any, has Mr. Zipperstein had with the Criminal Division's
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in general or Mr. Neil
Sher, in particular; (4) What involvement, if any, has Xr.
Zipperstein had with the Justice Coamand Center; (5) What
involvement, if any, has Mr. Zipperstein had with the Justice
Departnent's Office of ig pi | and Emergency Planning or Mr.
D. Jerry Rubino; (6) What involvement, if any, has Mr.

Zipperstein had with either the PROMIS software, the INSLAW

affair, or any investigation the Justice Department or an
external agency into any aspect of the INSLAW affair; (7) What

Document 8: A letter from Inslaw Inc’s lawyer Charles Work to Assistant Associate Attor-

ney General John C. Dwyer regarding the circumstances around the death of journalist
Danny Casolaro, March 1994.

John C. Dwyer, Esy.
March 14, 1994
Page 4.

involvement, if any, has Mr. Zipperstein had with either of two
former top Criminal Division officials from California, D.
Lowell Jensen and Stephen Trott; (8) What involvement, if any,
has Mr. Zipperstein had with the pending criminal investigation
by his U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles of Earl W. Brian
and Financial News Network (FNN) for possible securities fraud;
and (9) In light of the claim by some of INSLAW’s sources, that
Aisclosure of information to unauthorized persons could subject
them to penalties, what security clearances are currently held
by Mr. Zipperstein, FBI Special Agent Erskine, and yourself?

One point requires clarification. During the neeting, FBI
Agent Erskine read from the notes that he had been taking
during the neeting. As Mr. Hamilton pointed out to FBI Agent
Erskine, the notes significantly nisconstrued Mr. Hamilton's
statements about Mr. Casolaro during the meeting. FBI Agent
Erskine's notes quoted Mr. Hamilton as stating during the
meeting that Mr. Casolaro had been "embarrassed" by his
inability to develop evidence during the initial several months
of the investigation. What Mr. Hamilton had, in fact, said,
was that Mr. Casolaro appeared to have a fairly healthy psyche
because he was not enbarrassed to adnit his frustrations about
obtaining evidence during the initial few months cf his
investigation that began in August 1990. As Mr. Hamilton
stated, Mr. Casolaro was as comfortable talking about the
problems of the investigation as he was talking about the
eventual successes of his investication.

Finally, since our meeting of March 1, 1994, Mr.
Richardson received a letter from you dated March 7, 1994. In
that letter you requested copies of the following documents:
(1) "“{A} document published by the same Underseas Systezxs
Center in 1987 that revealed that its PROMIS is not only
operating at the land-based ‘test facility’ in Newport,
but is also operational on board both attack class and
‘boomer’ class submarines." (Addendum, p. 8.}

(2) "Justice Department docunents that INSLAW obtained
years later in litigation discovery suggest{ing) that
Vaveris actually assisted Videnieks in perpetrating the
sham dispute." {Addendum, p. 7.)

Attachnents C and D are in response to the aforementioned
requests.

Document 8: A letter from Inslaw Inc's lawyer Charles Work to Assistant Associate Attor-
ney General John C. Dwyer regarding the circumstances around the death of journalist
Danny Casolaro, March 1994.

John C., Dwyer, Esq.
March 14, 1994
Page 5 `

If we can be of any further assistance, pleasa do not

hesitate to call.
Sipcerely yours, Yrke

Charles R. Work
CRW/ ps
Enclosures
cc: Stephen Zipperstein, Esq., First Assistent, U.S,
Attorney's Office for Los Angeles

Mr, Scott A. Erskine, FBI Supervisory Special Agent
Philip L. Kellogg, Esq.
Michael E. Friedlander, Esq.

\OMES\OITISOCORCRW. 02 1

Document 8: A letter from Inslaw Inc’s lawyer Charles Work to Assistant Associate Attor-
ney General John C. Dwyer regarding the circumstances around the death of journalist
Danny Casolaro, March 1994.

Approved For Release 2008/07/09 : CIA-RDP85B01 152R0006007 10072-7 D/A Registry
pergamon ees

[nternational
Information ice
Corporation

September 6, 1983

Director of Central Intelligence
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC 20505

Sir:

Pergaman International Information Corporation is an elec-
tronic publishing company with a special interest in com-
puterized patent information. We are exclusive North American
representatives for the International Patent Documentation
Center in Vienna Austria (INPADOC)., INPADOC was founded
jointly by the Austrian government and the World Intellectual
Property Organization, a specialized agency of the United
Nations, to serve as a central authority for the collection and
dissemination of official patent information from around the
world. At present, patent documents from over fifty national
and regional patent offices are represented in the INPADOC
files.

Because national patent laws require complete disclosure of
the inventor's research, patent information represents the
state of the art in any technology and is perhaps the most
sensitive indicator of technical and scientific developments trends
around the world. Information from the INPADOC files can tell
you when and where such development are taking place and who or
what organizations are responsible. Studies by the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office and others have determined that 80-90 per
cent of the informaton disclosed in patents is not published in
any other scientific or technical literature.

A number of special features make the INPADOC files
particularly useful as an information resource. For example,
titles of patents from Japan, the Soviet Union and most Eastern
bloc countries are translated into English. Furthermore,
INPADOC is unique in its comprehensive coverage of Eastern bloc
and third world countries. Coverage for most of these
countries dates from 1973.

This information can be supplied to the CIA in whole or in
part, and in any one of several formats, e.g., online, magnetic
tapes or microfiche. We would be pleased to meet with

1340 Old Chain Bridge Road, McLean, Virginia 22101 (703) 442-0900, Telex: 90-181

Approved For Release 2008/07/09 : CIA-RDP85B01152RO006007 10072-7

Document 9: Letter from Pergamon International Information Corporation to CIA direc-
tor Bill Casey, September 1983.

URUNG WIP
The Wachenhue Corporation
Philip J. Sagona

Housatonic Valley Paper Co.
Servo Corporation of America
Semiconductor Specialists Inc.
S.G. Warburg & Co. Ltd.
Korvettes Inc,

Edward Swanson

Document 10: List of William Casey's legal clients from 1976 until his appointment as
CIA Director in January 1981, from the book Reagan's Ruling Class: Portraits of the Pres-

ident’s Top One Hundred Officials (pgs. 629-632). https://archive.org/details/reagansruling-
cla0000brow

630 REAGAN'S RULING CLASS

Florida Condominium Corp.
The Alternative Educational

REVISED CLIENT LIST

(List of Clients furnished by Rogers & Wells
with respect to which William J. Casey,
who was then affiliated with the firm,

had billable ame or otherwise received credit

during the period 1976-1981.)

Alexander & Alexander
The Alternative Education
American Society of Allied Health Professions
H. W. Anderson Products
Armor Products Inc.
Associated Press

Charles N. Atwood

Parley Augustsson

BRS Inc.

Virginia Bacon

Banque de Paris

Ford Bartlett

Bear, Stearns & Co
Bessemer Trust Company
Sidney B. Bowne & Son
Elwood D. Boynton

Broad Hollow Development
Jeremiah Burns, Inc.
Caesar's World

Capital Cities Communications, Inc.
Central American Pipeline
City of New York

Sidney Colen

Continental Hotels Corporation
Covert & Associates, Ine.

Cox & Company

DWG Corporation

Deak & Co Inc

Diamond Distributors, Inc.

Andrew Duell

E.T.P.M.

Energy Transition Corp.
Environmental Research & Technology
Jack Farber

Fidelity Management & Research Corp
Film Corporation of America

Anthony G. A. Fisher

Fitch Investors Service, Inc.

Florida Condominium Corp.

Document 10: List of William Casey's legal clients from 1976 until his appointment as
CIA Director in January 1981, from the book Reagan's Ruling Class: Portraits of the Pres-

ident’s Top One Hundred Officials (pgs. 629-632.) https://archive.org/details/reagansruling-
cla0000brow

NATIONAL SECURITY

John Foglia

Connie Francis

Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Fricdberg
Fulbright & Jaworski (D.C.)
Gamble-Skogmo

Gladding Corp

Government of Indonesia
Graphic Controls Corp.

Estate of Leonard W. Hall
Housatonic Valley Paper Co.
The Institute of Economic Affairs
Internauonal Crude Oil Refining Inc.
Kennecott Copper

Kephart Communications, Inc.
King Kullen Grocery Stores
Mitchell P. Kobelinsk:
Koren-DoResta

Korvertres

Nicholas Krapt

Litco Corporation of New York
Lockheed Aircraft

Long Island Forum for Technology
Long Island Trust Company

Vomuinique Maillard

Mastercraft Corp

Merrill Lynch Hubbard

Merrill Lynch International Bank
Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith
Miles Laboratories, Inc.

Moore, Schley, Cameron & Company
U. V. Musco

NAB Manufacturing Company

NVF Corporation

Nassau County

National Telephone Company
Newfoundland Kefining

New York State Employees Reurement Fund
Norse Petroleum A/S

Old Lane Internacional
Owens-Illinois Glass Mfg. Co.

Oyster Bay Foodtown

PAN AM World Airways

Parr Mcadows Racing Association
Pertamina

Peter Piffath

Je T..Poter

Maxwell M. Powell

Promenade Magazines, Inc.

Pullman, Inc.

Republic of Korea

Document 10: List of William Casey’s legal clients from 1976 until his appointment as
CIA Director in January 1981, from the book Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the Pres-

ident’s Top One Hundred Officials (pgs. 629-632). https://archive.org/details/reagansruling-
cla0000brow

632 REAGAN'S RULING CLASS

Resource Asia

Reynolds Construction Company

Estate of Joseph E. Ridder

Robert Ross/East-Europe Domestic International Sales Corp.
SCA Services, Inc.

Philip J. Sagona

Saudi American Lines

Scientific Life Systems (Dr. Irving Dardik)

Howard Sears, Jr.

Semiconductor Specialists, Inc.

Cassa Pasnacarinn AL A wanetnn

weevy VE PVE ALI Vi MINCHA
Shaheen Natural Resources
Abraham Shames

Sharon Steel Company

Sloan Valve Company
Lauraine G Smith

Edward Swanson

Tennessee Partners, Ltd.

Ter Bush & Powell, Inc.
Trubin, Silleocks, Edelman
Twentieth Century Fox
Walter Van der Waag
Joseph F. Virdone
Wachenhut Corp.

S. G. Wartburg & Company, Led.
David Westerman

Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
Milton Zipper

Casey's financial disclosure form, listing assets and liabilities was also revised as
the year went along. In his January 8, 1981 filing with the Office of Government
Ethics, Casey and his wife listed assets of at least $3.085 million, including holdings
of $100,000 or greater in: Prentice Hall, C&D Associates, Capital Cities Com-
munications, Philip Mortis, Raychem Corp.. Amarex, Inc.. Apache Corp., Dome
Petroleum, Kerr McGee, Southland Royalty, Standard Oil of Indiana, Superior Oil,
and Schlumberger Ltd. The couple reported holdings of $50,000 or more in
Georgia Pacific, Data Point Corp., IBM, Englehard Minerals & Chemicals, Atlantic
Richfield, Mesa Royalty Trust Unit, Halliburton, Intel Corp. , and two trusts related
to Southland, with smaller holdings in Exxon, Alcoa, DuPont, Amax. Armco. and
other firms. He listed no liabilities, nor any gifts.

In August, 1981, though, Casey amended his filing to add 10 additional assets
worth more than $145,000, and several liabilities (loan guarantees) worth $472,000
as well as a direct liability af $18,000. A few weeks earlier Jeff Gerth of the New
York Times revealed that Casey had received as a gift a $10,000 interest in Penverter
Partners, a computer technology firm Casey was given the stock by Carl G. Paffen-
dorf, who described himself as a frequent business associate.

Unlike his two predecessors, George Bush and Admiral Stansfield Turner, who
placed their holdings in blind crusts, Casey has kept control of his stocks. "I don’t
see why I should be picked on,'' Casey said when we asked about his decision. “The
law is the law; it's a clear cut law as to what you have to do with your stocks and I'm

Document 10: List of William Casey's legal clients from 1976 until his appointment as
CIA Director in January 1981, from the book Reagan's Ruling Class: Portraits of the Pres-

ident’s Top One Hundred Officials (pgs. 629-632). https://archive.org/details/reagansruling-
cla0000brow

SNT

Sot JUSETAL

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5 WEITZFAN ST.
TEL-AVIV

RE:

YOUR ENGUIGY/MILITARY EQUIPMENT

me ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee eee e e

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Document 11: Letter from Nicholas Davies (also signed “Davis”) to GMT Ltd., dated May
15, 1985. From Ari Ben-Menashe's Profits of War.

Sour LCENTIAL

ALL THE AGGVE ITEMS ARE NEN ANO OF YUGOSLAV MAKE AND -\Ory
CCOMPANTED EY SUFFLIERS QUALITY CERTIFICATE.

PRICES SET ARE F-O.G. YUGOSLAV PORT ANO DO NOT COVES
CARGO COSTS OR INSURANCE,

DELIVERY OF GOODS’ IS GUARANTEED TO BE MADE WITHIN
(PCOSSIELY WITHIN 45 DAYS) OF OPENING OF An ar Ft
OLVISAGLE ANC TRANSFERRAGLE LETTER OF CREOTT FOR THE = Et
uStlre4Z-e¢c.08 IN OUR FAVOR CONFIRMED EY ll PRIME SEUn2*:
QR PAYMENT IN CASH AGAINST CONTRACT.

EDIT SHOULD BE VALID FOR 75 94y ANE a it
x

ATOZ AWE FE AELERS ABLE IN UnC E “ype. eRe

Â. EILL OF LAIDING /FORWARDING AGENT'S RECEIPTS
=. SOMHERCIAL INVOICES c3 ORIGINALS)
Cc. FACKING LIST

IF NECESSARY? ITEMS CAN EE INSPECTED GY A HEST EUROPEAN HATING.
IN YUGOSLAVIA AFTER TRANSACTION ARRANGEMENTS HAVE EEEN COMPLE. 2.
(TRAVEL COSTS WILL NOT BE COVERED).

GUARANTEES FOR THE DELIVERY OF THE ABOVE ITEMS CAN BE MACE Ar?
WE UILL EE WILLING TO FUT UF A BOND OF 3.5% OF THE TOTAL UAL
OF YQUF FURCHeSE IN YOUR FAVOR WITH A PRIME EUROPEAR Gath uti.
COMPLETION OF DEAL ARRANGEHENTS.

WE UNDERSTAND THAT A VALIO AND ACCEFSTASLE ENG oer. Ss CERTIFICATE
MILL BE PROVIDED BY YOU. |

m

TMI TERME OUTLINED Aco ARE VALID UNTIL 15 JUN

RE Toe THE HATURE, IIZI SNC VOLURE JF TRC at

y AFSTROYa SOC TOME? TUTAS VELEME APPEGE«. 2 c
ugg? TeaT THE AECVE ITZ>3 WILL EE TSANSFORTES
„LISCI WHICH KILL REACH A YUGOSLAV PERT ON A 9
eTREEO UFOH, IF NECESSARY: TRANSPORT OF GOODS CANTE
US AGAINST ADDITIONAL PAYMENT.
HE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO COMPLETING THIS DEAL SUCCESSFULLY AND
TO DOING FURTHER BUSINESS WITH YOU.

FAITHFULLY:

NICHOLAS DAVIS
UK CONSULTANT

N

Document 11: Letter from Nicholas Davies (also signed “Davis”) to GMT Ltd., dated May
15, 1985. From Ari Ben-Menashe’s Profits of War.

INDEX

Index

A

Abbell, Mike 404, 405, 429

Abdullah Taha Bakhsh 371, 372

Abedi, Agha Hasan 269-272, 275-277, 279, 329, 395
Abrams, Creighton 164

Accompura, Tullius 164

Adams, Sherman 151

Adham, Kamal 78, 219, 274, 281
Adkinson, Mike 326, 338

Adonis, Joey 27, 72

Afonin, A 408

Aharon, Ben 82

Ahmad, Sani 234, 271

Air America 19, 154, 163, 210, 287, 408
Air Asia 399, 427

Aiton, Gordon 343

Ajax Oil Company 137

Albarelli, Hank 14, 38, 147, 265
Albritton, Joe L. 217

al-Fayed, Mohamed 243

Allen, Charles 140, 141, 441

Allen, Herbert 385, 410

Allen & Co. 140, 385, 410, 441
Allende, Salvador 165

Allen, Gary 170

Allen, George 151

Allen, Richard 66, 159

Allen, Robert H. 216, 261

Allied Bancshare 2, 13, 173, 185, 215, 216, 381
al-Shahati, Ahmad 234

Altman, Robert 275, 276, 282, 319, 396

N

American Bankers Life Assurance 21, 15

American Bank & Trust 83, 95

American Conservative 117, 145, 425

American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(AFL-CIO) 158, 195, 202, 224

American Financial Corporation 244

American-Indonesian Corporation 139

American Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD) 444, 460

American International Group (AIG) 365-368, 377, 378

American National Insurance Company (ANICO) 137, 157, 239, 240, 342, 368

AmeriCares 320, 441, 443-445, 447

Amoss, Ulius 136

An Affair of State 132

Anastasia, Albert 72

Anastasi, Paul 409

Andersen, Harold 160, 190, 448

Anderson, Jack 133, 167, 171-173, 191, 1

Anderson, Randy 277

Anderson, Robert B. 80, 353, 355

Anderson, Robert O. 218, 219, 261

Anderson Security 176

Andropov, Yuri 278

Angleton, James J. 60, 118, 175

Anglo-Iranian Oil Company 12

Anslinger, Harry J. 15, 16, 103

API Distributors 205, 206, 212

Arazi, Yehuda 70-73, 82

Arbusto Energy 371

Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) 361-363, 365-367, 376

NO
lex
N
Š
j
N
Ca
go
N
NI
R
(09)
E
=
(09)
N
È
abs
lon
N

Arkansas Housing Development Authority 361
Armstrong, David 331-334, 370, 372, 373, 378, 379
Arnon, Joel 295

Aroundworld Shipping & Charting 166, 189, 206
Artime, Manuel 212

Arum, Robert 121

Arundel, Arthur 172

Arzu, Alejos 445

Ashley, Chester 358

Aspinall, John 130

Aspin, Michael and Leslie 308, 309
Assia, Yehuda 83, 95

Astor, Vincent 8, 132

Atlas Corporation 28, 29, 75-77, 90, 175
ATLAS dossier 310-313, 336, 416, 431
Attie, James 78

Aubin, George 351, 375

Avery, Jake 24, 25, 32

Aviation Industries Association (AIA) 152
Avirgan, Tony 348, 373

Ayres, Gene 32, 40, 429

Azima, Farhad 210, 211, 267, 408

B

Bailey, Norman 395

Bailley, Phillip 183, 184, an 188

Baird, David G. 25, 140, 141, 454, 462

Baird Foundation 140, 2 462

Baker, Bernard 174

Baker, Bobby 172, 183, 184

Baker, Howard 403

Baker, Russ 217, 218, 260, 278, 330, 370, 371
Balach, Paul R. 452

Baldwin, Alfred 182

Ball, Ed 236, 237

Ballesteros, Juan Matta 290, 341, 400

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) 92, 308, 317-321, 337
Banco Ambrosiano 92, 308, 317

Bandar bin Sultan 217

Banerjee, Ben 308, 309

Bank for Commerce and Credit International 241
Bank Leumi 86, 90, 441

Bank of America 77, 272, 275, 277, 280, 356

Bank of Commerce and Credit International 235, 269

Bank of Credit and Commercial International 220

Bank of New York (BNY) 353

Bank of New York (BONY) 419-423, 432

Bank of Perrine 34, 236

Bank of the Southwest 189, 215

Bank of World Commerce (BWC) 34, 75, 76, 185

Bank van Embden 230, 231

Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP) 372

Banque Privée 231

Banque Worms 308, 317

Barak, Ehud 83, 95

Barcella, Lawrence 208

Barnes, Ben 184, 260, 357

Baron Rothschild 231

Barr, William 207, 349, 350, 406, 433, 451, 462

Barry, E.P. 34, 85, 213, 228, 253, 333, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 347, 349, 352, 373,
428, 436

Baskes, Roger S. 33

Bass family 355

Bassile, Darryl 442

Bath, James R 277, 278, 291, 371

Batista, Fulgencio 75

Battisti y Lora, Amleto 15

BCCI ( Bank of Credit and Commerce International) 78, 79, 86, 92, 95, 150-152,
217, 220, 221, 224, 225, 235, 261, 269-282, 286, 298, 300, 301, 304-306, 309,
312, 313, 315, 317, 318, 321, 322, 329, 330, 333-338, 349, 353, 356, 368, 371,
372, 379, 394-397, 404, 407, 409, 410, 419, 427, 433, 447

Bear Stearns 216, 245, 441, 443, 456

Beaty, Jonathan 95, 269-271, 278, 329, 330

Bechtel Corporation 314-317, 320, 336, 337, 357, 401, 443

Beck, Dave 342

Beckerman, Edith 26, 438

Beckley, Gilbert Lee 185

Beebe, Herman 184, 212, 213, 215, 260, 338, 352, 363, 375, 376

Beidas, Yousef 77, 78

Bellini, Fulvio 92

Benelie, David 124, 312

Benex International Co. 418, 419, 422
Ben-Gurion, David 70, 83
Ben-Menashe, Ari 295, 318, 332, 333, 337, 351, 384, 390, 428
Bennett, Robert 175, 179
Bentrovato, Anthony 248
Bentsen, Lan 278

Bentsen, Lloyd 214, 278
Berezovsky, Boris 418, 423
Berezovsky, Igor and Oleg 418
Bergt, Phil 218

Berlin, Peter 419

Berlin, Richard 135, 161, 381
Bernstein, Carl 179

Bernstein, Nahum 71

Bernstein, Raphael 216
Berrellez, Hector 290

Bevan, David 455, 456, 463
Beverly Enterprises 362, 366
Bichler, Shimshon 83, 95
Biedenkopf, Kurt 449

Biegun, Dov 89, 97

Biner, Maureen (Dean) 183, 188
bin Mahfouz, Khalid 277, 278, 371, 394
Bird, William H. 18, 20

Bird, Willis 18, 20

Black, Eli 444

Black, Eric 457, 463

Black, Fred Jr. 184

Black, Leon 444

Blakemore, William III 213
Blandén, José 209, 283, 284
Blick, Roy 175, 177, 186
Blinken, Anthony 409

Block, Alan 33, 40, 77, 80, 81, 84, 94, 96, 147, 198, 230, 231, 237, 249, 262, 263,
266, 297, 315, 316, 329, 330, 332, 333, 336, 356, 375, 376, 378, 379, 421, 422,
431, 432

Bloomfield, Bernard 90

Bloomfield, Louis Mortimer 86-90, 97, 140, 148

B'nai B'rith International 79, 229, 261, 439, 440, 459

Boas, Roger 312, 313

Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover
That Transformed America 61, 67, 68

Bobolas, George 408, 409

Bode, William 324, 348

Boesky, Ivan 246, 265, 447

Boeynants, Paul Vanden 312, 313

Bofors-Nobel 307, 318, 321

Bohlen, Charles 116

Bolan, Tom 120, 436, 441, 444, 458

Bonacci, Paul 448, 453

Bon Ami company 137-140, 147

Bower, Tom 415, 430

Boyer, Eli 121, 122, 138

Breaking the Banks 343, 373

Brennan, Earl 5, 285

Brenneke, Richard 214, 296, 325, 351

Brenner, Marie 435, 458

Brewer, C. Madison “Brick” 384

Brewer, James W. 239, 240, 241

Brewton, Pete 130, 198, 211-214, 254, 259, 260, 264, 265, 267, 30S, 326, 330,
331, 334, 335, 337, 338, 353, 375, 376, 377, 446, 461

Brezhnev, Leonid 278

Brian, Earl 363, 384, 385, 387, 390, 391, 404-406, 410, 411, 428

Brill, Joseph 38, 123

British Security Coordination (BSC) 6, 7, 8

Broady, John G. “Steve” 136, 137, 147

Broderick, Joseph 109

Broman, Harry 42

Bronfman, Abe 44

Bronfman, Charles 25, 70

Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World 44, 66, 69, 87, 94, 333, 337

Bronfman, Edgar 41, 79, 250, 266, 440

Bronfman family 13, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 87, 140, 333

Bronfman, Harry 44, 45

Bronfman, Mindel and Yechiel 41

Bronfmans 13, 41-51, 66, 67, 87,

Bronfman, Samuel 42, 43, 46-52,

Brooklyn Eagle 13, 194

Brooks, Jack 406

Brotherhood of Eternal Love 33

Brown, Anthony Cave 222, 262

Brown, L.D. 29, 95, 131, 222, 262, 329, 330, 333, 335, 336, 337, 347, 374, 377,
462

Brown, Pat 29

Bruce, David K. E. 129, 132, 226, 227, 250

Brull, Sergio 326, 327, 377

Bruno, Angelo 129

Bryant, Nick 374, 445, 446, 452, 453, 461, 462

Brzezinski, Zbigniew 444, 448

Bua, Nicholas 406, 429, 433

Bua report 406, 433

Buccieri, Fiore “Fifi” 31

Buccieri, Frank 31

Buchalter, Louis “Lepke” 103, 104

Buckley, William 298

Buckley, William F. 136, 156, 228, 435, 436

Buhler, Alfred 351

Buhl, Henry III 231

Bull, Gerald 318, 319, 337

Burmah Oil 12, 237, 238

Bursten, Leonard 83

Bush, Barbara 445

Bush, George H.W. 88, 97, 131, 153, 160, 20S, 207, 213, 215, 216, 218, 254, 261,
276, 277, 282, 283, 319, 324-326, 331, 334, 339, 344, 349, 370, 371, 376, 382,
398, 406, 411, 433, 443, 444, 445, 447, 451, 460

Bush, George W. 218, 260, 277, 344, 368, 371
Bush, Jeb 325, 344

Bush, Neil 331, 376, 447

Bush, Prescott 131

Bush, Prescott Jr. 444

Butler, George A. 216, 232

Byrne, Terry 318, 331, 373

C

Cabazon Indian Reservation 338, 363, 364, 390, 391, 393, 402
Cabrera, Pepe 323

Caccia, Harold 135

Caddy, Douglas 136, 147, 156

Calero, Mario 285, 323, 325, 444

Calhoun, Ricky-Dale 71, 94

Calia, Vincenzo 92

Calvi, Roberto 317
Camarena, Enrique “Kiki” 290
Cameron, David 13

Capaldi, Leonard 240

Capell, Frank 170

Capone, Al 4, 24, 26, 53

Cardoen, Carlos 318, 337

Carey, Edward 237, 303, 354

Carey Energy 237, 238, 239, 251

Carey, Hugh 237, 303, 441

Carey, Martin 237, 303

Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co 266, 356

Carlson, Roy 275, 277

Carmen, David 447

Carolla, Silvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” 9, 10, 20

Carriles, Luis Posada 324, 337, 338

Carter, Billy 234, 235, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 263, 264

Carter, Jimmy 4, $, 37, 77, 97, 104, 136, 205, 213, 218, 224, 225, 234, 235, 238,
239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 251, 263, 264, 272, 273, 276, 292, 357, 376, 377, 400,
410, 434, 444

Casey, William J. 34, 80, 129, 150, 151, 160, 202, 225-230, 232, 233, 244-255,
257, 262-264, 267, 280-284, 293, 294, 296, 313, 315, 322, 323, 325, 350, 354-
356, 367, 375, 388, 426, 437, 439, 444, 447, 450-453, 455

Casolaro, Danny 338, 363, 364, 376, 377, 393, 397, 403-406, 410, 411, 426, 427,
429

Castellano, Paul 221, 303, 438

Castillo, José Blandén 209, 330

Castle Bank and Trust 25, 30, 32-36, 77, 273, 323, 366, 367

Castle, Jerome 25

Castro, Fidel 9, 27, 36, 161, 162, 163, 164, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181, 185, 189, 197,
212, 213, 223, 262

CBS Evening News 190

Cecchi, Micucci 92

Celler, Emmanuel 141

Cellini, Dino 185, 223

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 4, 5, 9, 14, 15-21, 24, 25, 27,
68, 74, 78, 80, 83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96, 108, 114, 117-119, 122, 129, 130, 136,
137, 139-141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152-168, 171-179, 183, 184, 186, 189,
191, 194-198, 201-210, 212-215, 218, 219, 223-229, 233, 235, 242-245, 251-
259, 261-266, 270, 275, 277, 278, 280-285, 287-294, 296, 297, 300, 312, 313,
316, 322-326, 329-338, 340, 341, 344-352, 354, 356, 361, 363, 367, 371, 373-
378, 381, 382, 384, 385, 388-394, 396-402, 404, 406, 408, 425-427, 429, 432,
433, 437, 439, 442-447, 450-454, 457, 461, 462

Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) 87-92, 96, 98

Cermak, Anton 24

Chagra, Jimmy 347, 374

Chambers, Ernie 448

Chanes, Frank 233

Chang, Suzy 134, 135

Channell, Carl “Spitz” 288, 289, 293, 331, 352

Charlton, Warwick 131

Charter Company 236-239, 244, 251, 261, 263, 264

Chase Manhattan Bank 76, 77, 443, 462

>
5
È
lB

Chavez, Ricardo 162, 206

Chelsea National Bank 279

Chemical Bank 216, 217, 354, 364, 377
Ch'en Ch'i-mei 10

Cheng Yu-tung 360

Chennault, Anna 153, 154, 158, 159, 171, 172, 194, 196, 212,

Chennault, Claire 18, 19, 20, 153, 154,
Cherne, Leo 226

Chernenko, Konstantin 278

Chesler, Lou 76, 77, 140, 265, 440

Chiang Kai-Shek 10, 11, 19, 147, 153, 154, 194
Chicago Tribune 39, 119, 263

Chiliad 130

457

China Lobby 16, 19, 38, 153-156, 159, 164, 167, 168, 170-172, 180, 201, 202,

212, 343
Chinoy, Nazir 271
Christian Science Monitor 234, 263
Chung Il Kwon 149
Chung, Margaret 20
Church Committee 406, 451
Churchill, Winston 37, 47, 53, 66, 129
Cicogna, Gianfranco 84
Citigroup 23, 366
Civella crime family 211
Civil Air Transport (CAT) 18-20, 154
Civilian Materiel Assistance (CMA) 291, 292, 332
Clarke, Jack 31
Clarridge, Duane 210, 283, 344
Clayton, David 155, 194
Clermont Club 130-132, 219, 231, 242, 301, 357

Clifford, Clark 76, 151, 152, 184, 224, 275, 276, 282, 319, 396

Cline, Ray 201, 202, 352

Clines, Thomas 162, 163, 165, 166, 192, 202, 204-210,
258, 259, 281, 284, 285, 307, 324

Clinton, Bill 330, 346, 347, 348, 361, 366, 395

Clinton, Hillary 30, 359, 374, 376, 396, 459

212,

224,

Clinton, Raymond 236, 238, 244, 346, 347, 393

Clinton, Roger 347, 350

Clinton, Stanford 32

Clore, Alan 217, 261

Cobb, Richard S. 224

Cocaine Politics 259, 263, 265, 330, 331, 332, 334, 337, 344, 373, 427

Cockburn, Alexander 347, 362, 364, 365, 374, 376, 377, 417, 431

Cockrell, Ernest Jr. 189

COG (Continuity of government) program 391, 392

Cohen, Avner 83, 95

Cohen, William 256, 257

Cohn, Albert 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 142, 143, 439, 440

Cohn, Roy 25, 54, 56-59, 62-65, 67, 68, 72, 99-103, 105-108, 110-116, 118-130,
133, 135-139, 142-147, 156, 157, 160, 192, 195, 228, 241, 293, 294, 303, 311,
332, 434-442, 444, 446, 450, 458, 459

COINTELPRO 180

Collins, Paul David 59

Colombo family 221

Colony Sports Club 129

Columbus Dispatch 457, 463

Commercial Credit Corporation 210, 408

Committee for the Reelection of the President (CRP 173, 176, 188
Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) 27, 28, 202, 258
Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 279, 316, 317, 408, 429
Compagnie de Services Fiduciaire (CSF) 286, 287,299
Compagnie Financière 89

Compromised 207, 258, 363, 366, 374, 376, 377

Conein, Lucien 165

Connally, John 277, 356, 357, 358

Control Data Corporation (CDC) 210, 406-411

Cook, Bradford 233

Cook, O. Jackson 251

Cooney, John 117

Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) 164, 324
Coppola, Frank 9, 416

Coral Reinsurance Company 365-367, 377

Corbally, Thomas 128-136, 442

Corcoran, Thomas 19

CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) 164
Cornfeld, Bernie 229, 230, 232, 265, 287, 331

Corona, Ray 266, 303, 334

Corson, Robert 213, 214, 260, 325, 326, 331, 375

Corson, William 257, 285

Costa, Antonio Maria 22

Costello, Frank 2-4, 9, 12, 20, 25, 27, 54, 60, 102, 104, 10S, 114, 115, 144, 346
Cotroni, Vincenzo 72, 333

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) 30, 170, 201, 218, 261
Coutin, Jose 344, 373

Covenant House 245, 320, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 460
Cowen, Joshua Lionel 111, 112, 144

Cowett, Edward 287

Cox, Edwin L. 217, 261

Craig, Larry 193

Crater, Mike 457, 463

Credit and Commerce American Holdings 275, 276, 277
Credit Suisse 286, 298, 316, 389, 394

Crimes of the Patriots 258, 369, 378

Critchfield, Jim 206, 225, 281

Crittenden, Robert 358

Crosby, James 5, 136

Crosby, Peter 5, 136, 137

Cross-fire: Witness in the Clinton Investigation 347

Crossing the Rubicon 22, 39, 427

Crowley, Robert 152, 153

Crown, Henry 24-28, 30, 47, 116, 140, 146

Crown, Lester 116

Cuellar, Joseph 405

Cummings, John 207, 258, 330, 340, 363, 366, 373, 374
Cummings, Nathan 140, 258, 294, 330, 332, 340, 363, 366, 373-377
Cummings, Samuel 294, 332

Cuomo, Mario 441, 442

Curtis, Adam 130, 146
Curtis, Tony 32

D

Dafne, Reuven 72

Daily Mirror 295, 296, 383

Dalitz, Moe 25, 26, 32, 47, 89, 90, 112, 121, 122, 138, 140, 184, 402, 438
d'Amelio, Carlo 140, 148

Damme, Willy van 124, 145, 311, 336

Dardi, Virgil 138, 139, 140, 147

Dark Victory 28, 40

Daub, Hal 446

Davidson, Irving 83, 95, 184

Davies, Nicholas 295, 296, 333

Davis, John 9

Davis, L.J. 358, 359, 376

Day, James C. 239

Deak & Co. 245, 264, 265

Deak, Nicholas 245, 246, 264, 265

Dean, John 183, 187, 188, 197

DeBartolo, Edward 420

DeCamp, John 59, 67, 160, 190, 195, 445, 450, 461, 462
de Costa, Sergio 321

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK 14, 38, 40, 94, 133, 146, 194, 462
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) 165, 202

Degem 386, 387

Delamico, Mario 296, 323, 334

Del E. Webb Development Company 342

Dellal, Jack 130, 242, 264

DeLoach, Deke 126

De Morgen 313, 336

Dempsey, Jack 49

Denker, Henry 29

Denton, Sally 37, 103, 142, 143, 157, 195, 336, 347, 348, 373, 374
Derks, Hans 12, 38

de Rothschild, Edmond 79, 81, 89, 90, 231, 298, 301, 310, 416, 422, 423, 440
Dershowitz, Alan 435, 436, 458

Desert Inn 25, 122, 138, 140

Desperate Deception 7, 37, 38

Detachment 101 17, 18

Deuss, John 206, 207, 255, 258, 280, 312, 330

Devil's Chessboard, The 117, 145, 425

Devine, Donald 447

Devlin, Larry 356

DeVoe, Jack 323, 326, 456, 457, 463

Dewey, Thomas E. 2,-4, 6, 8, S6, 77, 103, 104, 107, 108, 114, 120, 143, 177
DeWitt, William Jr. 371

Dibben, Horace 134

Dill, Nicholas Bayard 287

Dillon, Matt 94, 257, 260, 267, 276, 386, 425, 426, 430, 431

Dintino, Justin 249

Distillers Company Limited 47

Distillers Corporation Limited 46, 47

Dixon, John W. 399

Djerassi, Dale 387, 389

Doan, Harry 339, 340, 341

Doinov, Ognian 412

Dole, Elizabeth 452

Dolin, Nate 89, 90

Donaldson, Sam 66, 191

d'Onofrio, Ramon 351

Donovan, William J. 6-9, 13, 16, 29, 37, 60, 97, 135, 222, 226, 227, 250, 262, 367
Dorfman, Allen 32, 263

Dorril, Stephen 129, 132, 146

Dossier 194, 237, 263, 329, 336, 431

Downey, Joyce 357

Doyle, John 241, 250, 266, 336

Drake, Michael 362

Dreher, Rod 117, 145

Drexel Burnham Lambert 246, 352, 353, 368, 441, 443, 447, 456

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) 233, 290, 300, 311, 332, 343, 344, 399

Dubini, Nicola 307

du Cann, Edward 242, 243, 244, 264, 400
Duleimi, Ahmed 219

Dulles, Allen 4, 6, 108, 118, 145, 250, 381, 425
Dulles, John Foster 4, 37, 108

Duncan, John H. Sr. 215, 349, 377

Dunes Hotel and Casino 79, 211

Dunlop, Robert 243

Dunne, Dominick 424, 425, 432

DuPonts 6, 235, 236, 263, 278, 291, 326, 332, 341
du Pont, Richard C. Jr 291

Dupres, Devon 190

Dutcher, Charles K 452

DWG Corporation 246, 247

Dwyer, John 103-105, 114, 136, 405, 429

E

Eagleburger, Lawrence 319, 320, 321

Eagleton, Thomas 128

Earl, Robert 325

Eccles, George 157, 368

Economist, The 41, 246, 265

Edwards, David 372

Edwards, Lucy 419

Egyptian-American Air Transport and Services Corporation (EATSCO) 207,
208, 210, 280, 284, 408

Ehrenfeld, Rachel 311, 333, 336

Eifler, Carl F 17

Eisele, Albert 411

Eisenberg, Shaul 73, 94, 142, 295, 382

Eisenhower, Dwight D 4, 20, 21, 80, 116, 120, 150, 151, 155, 355, 356, 440

Eisenson, Michael 370

Eitan, Rafi 384, 385, 387, 390

Eitel, Gary 401, 428

Elias, Christopher 101

Eliot, George Fieling 8

Encyclopedia of Public Relations 152, 194

Engineering Research Associates (ERA) 407

Enron 371, 378, 408

Epes, Wooten 362

Epstein, Edward Jay 152, 237, 263, 329

Epstein, Jeffrey 13, 20, 30, 79, 83, 84, 130, 160, 217, 231, 237, 245, 297, 300, 320,
330, 334, 352, 366, 398, 406, 407, 435, 439, 441, 445, 449, 452, 457, 462

Erskine, Graves B. 154, 155

Escobar, Pablo 282

Esquire 52, 55, 66, 145

E-Systems 345, 398, 399, 400, 401, 404, 40S, 427

Euromoney magazine 307, 335

European, The 37, 119, 220, 222, 227, 250, 301, 306-308, 310, 356-358, 369, 37S,
381, 383, 419, 420, 424, 449

Evergreen International Aviation 19, 399, 400, 401, 405

Evil Money 311, 333, 336

Exchange and Investment Bank 21, 76, 157

Executive Jet Aviation (EJA) 453, 454, 455, 456, 457

F

FABCO 360, 376

Fabian, S. H. 141

Fair, Harry 364

Faith, Nicholas 42, 45, 51, 52, 54-56, 66, 67, 264, 460
fi

Family of Secrets 260, 261, 278, 330, 378

Farer, Tom 34, 400

Farina, Roland 287

Farrara, James 35

Fassoulis, Satiris “Sonny” 137, 139

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 5, 7, 8, 15, 17, 28, 38, 57-62, 64, 67, 68, Z5,
95, 99, 103, 116-118, 123, 126-128, 132, 134, 174, 180-182, 184-187, 191,
194, 196, 198, 205-207, 228, 239-241, 249, 250, 252, 258, 261, 266, 289, 2

N

299, 305, 317, 326, 327, 332, 333, 338, 339, 344, 346, 374, 387-389, 392, 403,

405, 413, 422, 423, 425-427, 436, 468, 471-49

Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) 5, 13-16, 37, 72, 73, 78, 79, 90, 94, 97, 103 5,
13, 38, 72, 78, 20, 94, 103

Feess, Gary 35

Feightner, E.L. “Whitey” 401

Feinberg, Abraham 83

Felt, Mark 180

Ferdmann, Sylvain 76

Ferrari, A. 317

Ferraro, Geraldine 128

Filardo, Louis 80

Filner, Joseph 409

Financial General Bankshares (FGB 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 395, 396, 409
Findlay, Walter 46

Finkel, Robert 190, 191

Firing Line 435

Firpo, Luis 49

First American Bankshares 152, 276, 317, 353

First Arkansas Bankstock Corporation (FABCO) 360

First Intercontinental Development Corporation (FIDCO) 364, 402

First International Bancshares 217, 398

First National Bancshares Ltd 217

First National Bank of Boston 140

First National City Bank 86, 96, 429

Fisher, Max 70, 74, 79, 140, 244, 245, 246, 264, 265, 385, 410, 439, 440, 444, 447,
457, 461

Fitts, Catherine Austin 22, 23,24, 39,276

Fitzpatrick, Francis 179, 180

Fitzpatrick, Paul 104, 105

Flamingo Hotel 79, 342

Fleiss, Heidi 135

F. L. Jacobs (company) 138, 139

Florio, A. 318

Flying Tiger Line 19, 20, 211, 341, 457

Flying Tiger Lines 154, 291

Flying Tigers 18, 19, 20, 153

Flynn, Ed 101, 103, 104, 10S, 108, 142, 288
Foley, Pat 291, 341

Forbes 395, 397, 398, 461

Ford, Gerald 205, 352, 446

Ford, John 401, 428

Foreign Intelligence Digest 155, 170

Forgan, David R. 227

Forgan, James B. 227

Forgan, J. Russell 227-229, 233, 250, 455

Forgber, Guenther 418

Forrester, Vaughn 348

Foster, Vince 4, 37, 108, 145, 359, 394, 395, 397, 398
Fox Broadcasting Corporation 294

Fox, Matthew 139, 140

Francisci, Marcel 79

Francis, Johnny 129

Frankenstein, Samuel I. 106, 107

Franklin Cover-Up, The 160, 195, 445, 461, 462
Franklin Scandal 445, 448, 452, 457, 461, 462

Freeh, Louis 436, 458

Freeman, Jack 189, 323, 326

French Connection 10, 72, 78, 431

Fricker, Mary 213, 259, 261, 334, 375, 376, 425, 426
Friedman, Stanley 90, 95, 425, 431, 432, 435, 440
Frigorificos de Puntarenas 233, 234, 289, 290, 295, 344
Furmark, Roy 251, 252, 266, 267

Fusco, Joe $3, 54
G
G-28

Gaddafadam, Ahmed 243, 244
Gaddafi, Muammar 204, 234, 237, 243
Gaess, Anthony 248, 249

Galante, Carmine 72, 73, 434

Gallagher, Neil 112, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 146, 261, 435
Gallardo, Felix 290, 400

Gallinaro, William $8

Galvin, John R. 322, 337

Gambino family 213, 221, 249, 303, 350, 403, 438
Garfield, Sam 122, 123, 138

Garrison, Jim 87, 96, 198

Garwood, Ellen 289, 348, 349

Gavin, James 319

Gaynor, Paul 174, 175

General Dynamics 24, 25, 27, 28

Genis, Sam 27, 29

Genovese crime family 72, 185, 192, 248, 249, 250, 434
Geoffrey's Bank 123, 124, 311

GeoMiliTech Consultants Corporation (GMT) 294-2 eee 332, 352
George Town Club 136, 147, 153-159, 164, 189, 194, 202, 214
Gettlin, Robert 181, 196-198

Ghorbanifar, Manucher 256, 257, 285, 286, 394

Giancana, Sam 54, 133

Gianquinto, Eugene 402, 403, 438

Giroday, Jean de la 296

Giroir, C. Joseph 358, 359, 361

Gittinger, John 16

Glatt, Ernest Werner 294

Glen Alden 64, 65, 141

Glenn, John 449, 462

Glennon, Edward 100

Glick, Gene 342, 343

Global Competition After the Cold War: A Reassessment of Trilateralism 449

Global International Airways 210, 211, 267, 408
Glore Forgan 229, 233, 455

Godfather, The (book) 114

Gokal, Abbas 279, 280

Gokal, Murtaza 279, 280

Gokal, Mustafa 279

Goldman Sachs 74, 109, 319, 365, 366, 457

Goldsmith, James 130, 231, 357, 359
Goldwyn, Samuel 28

Gonzales, Virgilio 174

Gonzalez, Henry B. 319

Goodfellow, Preston 13

Gooding, Anthony James Tullis 34
Gorbachev, Mikhail 411, 415, 419, 430
Gorman, Paul F 343, 344

Gottlieb, Sidney 15, 38

Gouletas 320, 366, 385, 407, 443
Grabbe, J. Orlin 398, 407

Grace, Peter 443, 444

Graham, Daniel 296

Gray, Robert Keith 143, 149-154, 158-160, 164, 166, 171, 180, 189, 190-192, 194,

199, 202, 209, 212, 253, 255, 267, 277, 288, 331, 377, 378, 403, 438-440,

457, 459
Great Gatsby, The 449
Greenberg, Alan 245, 367, 378, 441
Greene, Arthur 31
Green Gang 10, 11, 12, 20
Greenspun, Hank 118
Gregg, Donald 177, 252, 255, 283, 284, 324, 325, 334, 337, 451
Gregg, Sam 177
Greycas 341, 342, 343
Gross, Harry 104
GRU 131
Guarantee Trust Company 83
Guerin, James 318
Guevara, Che 162
Guilmartin, James 21
Guinness family 246
Gurfein, Murray 5
Gurfinkel, Natasha 419, 420, 421
Gurwin, Larry 280, 329, 330, 333, 335, 379, 427, 431
Guterma, Alexander 137, 138, 139, 140, 147
Gwynne, S. C. 95, 269-271, 278, 329, 330, 431

448,

H

Haaretz 95, 144, 389, 426

Haas, Joseph 291

Haddad, William 172, 173, 188

Hadron 385

Hafftendon, C. Radcliff 2, 37

Haganah 69-74, 79, 81-83, 94, 20

Haig, Alexander 167, 169, 170, 178, = 179, 180, 190, 202, 285, 446

Hakim, Albert 204, 284, 285, 286, 287, 298, rin 345

Halper, Stefan 352

Hamilton, Bill 383, 384, 392, 397, 404, 406, 410, 413, 430

Hamilton, Nancy 383, 391, 446, 459

Hammer, Armand 142, 194, 236, 237, 238, 263, 273, 274, 277, 316, 329, 409, 429,
447

Hammond, Leonard 309

Hammoud, Mohammed 306, 372

Hand, Michael 203

Hanna, Richard T. 91, 149

Harari, Michael 209, 210, 283, 288, 351

Harel, Ron 294, 297

Harken Energy 368, 370-372, 378

Harrelson, Charles 347

Harriman, W. Averell 131, 146, 227

Hartford Courant 265, 444, 460

Hartmann, Alfred 280, 312, 317, 357, 372

Harvey, William 161, 175

Hasenfus, Eugene 327, 339

Hashemi, Cyrus 251-253, 255-257

Hashemi, Jamshid 252, 253, 256

Hastings Tribune 150

Hatch, L. Boyd 29

Hatch, Orrin 241, 277, 305, 306, 372

Hatta, Mohammed 139

Haynes, Charles F. 211, 212, 349, 378

Hazell, Clare 246

Hefner, Hugh 32

Heikal, Mohammed 220, 261

Helliwell, Paul 17-21, 30, 33, 34, 36, Z1, 77, 83-85, 155, 157, 161,
9

B
$
È

273, 292, 323, 366-368, 420
Helms, Richard 61, 165, 177, 179, 197, 229, 270, 275, 32
Henderson, Helen 182
Hendricks, Chuck 345
Hendrix, John 360
Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent 170
Herlands, William B. 1
Hersh, Burton 58, 61, 63, 67, 68, 254, 255, 267, 328, 333, 461
Herzog, Arthur 231, 237, 262, 263
Hicks, Calvin 206
Hill, John 152
Hill & Knowlton (H & K) 152, 154, 159, 171, 192, 277, 288, 293
Hill, Virginia 20, 39
Hines, Gerald D. 215, 216, 260, 373
History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, 1600-1950 12, 38
Hitchcock, William Mellon 33, 129, 131, 132, 134, 227
Hitchock, William Mellon 137
Hoch, Jan Ludvick (Maxwell) 381
Hodara, David 85
Hodge, Charles 455
Hoffa, Jimmy 9, 29, 32, 121, 125, 126, 157, 2L1, 248, 342
Hoffman, Bryce 62, 63, 68, 100, 112, 113, 115, 119, 122, 125, 128, 142-146,
365, 435, 458
Hogan, Frank 2, 61
Holden, William 221, 222

ON
ho
kn

Hondu Carib 290, 341
Honey, Martha 348, 373
Hoover, J. Edgar 7, 16, 17, 37, 57-64, 67, 68, 99, 103, 115-118, 122, 123, 125-128,

133, 135, 142, 171, 181, 241, a 373, 442
Hopsicker, Daniel 341-344, 373
Hosenball, Mark 306
Ho, Stanley 360

Hostler, Charles 372

Hot Money and the Politics of Debt 21, 39, 76, 95, 196, 262

Hougan, Jim ZS, Z9, 94, 95, 159, 167, 170, 173, 174, 181-183, 188, 195-198, 229-
231, 262, 263, 265

Hourani, Mounzer 305, 306, 335

Houston Post 446

Ho Yin 360

Hoy, Patrick 25, 27, 39

Hubbell, Webster 359, 362, 394, 396

Hudson's Bay Company 13, 45-47, 66

Hugel, Max 80, 447

Hull, John 288, 289, 292, 327, 344, 373

Humphrey, Gordon J. 444

Hundley, William 342, 461
Hunt, E. Howard 17, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 184, 201, 292
Hunt, H. L. 155

Huntley, Clarence 165

Hunt, Nelson Bunker 289, 348, 351
Hurwitz, Charles 351, 352, 353, 375
Hussein, Saddam 314

Hyatt Development Corp 30-32,

I

Icthyan Associates 139

Information on Demand 387-389

Inman, Bobby Ray 202-204, 253, 254

Inslaw 210, 257, 338, 362-364, 383-385, 387, 388, 392, 396-398, 404-406, 410,
413, 429, 430, 438

Institute for Democracy, Education, and Assistance (IDEA) 288, 289

Inter Maritime Bank (IMB) 34, 84-86, 231, 280, 292, 312, 315, 317, 353, 419-421

Intermountain Aviation 291, 399

International Computerized Land Research (ICLR) 34, 35

International Controls Corporation (ICC) 231, 232

International Credit Bank (ICB) 75, 76, 86, 89, 92

International Fund for Mergers and Acquisitions (IFMA) 351

International Maritime Services 84

International Research and Trade (IRT) 205, 206

International Youth Federation for Freedom 156

Intra Bank 77, 78, 79

Investors Overseas Services (IOS) 29, 85, 229-233, 237, 238, 242, 244, 261, 265,
286, 287, 296, 400

Iorizzo, Lawrence 221, 303, 334

Iran-Contra affair 17, 73, 78, 79, 124, 130, 150, 160, 162, 163, 204-206, 208, 212-
214, 216, 219, 225, 243, 255, 258, 260, 267, 281, 287, 288, 293, 294, 298, 299,
301, 304, 305, 311, 314, 315, 322, 324, 332, 333, 335-338, 341, 344, 345, 348,
349, 351, 352, 386, 393, 394, 401, 404, 406, 422, 427, 433, 439, 440, 447, 451

Iran: The Untold Story 220, 261

Irving Trust 353

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) 73, 297

Israel and the Bomb 83, 95

Israel Defense Force (IDF) 69, 81, 83

Italo-American Hotel Corporation (IAHC) 92

Ivanov, Eugene 131, 132, 135

Iver Johnson's Arms 363

Ives, Kevin 351

Ives, Linda 351, 375

J

Jackson, Andrew 106

Jameson, Donald 206, 225, 281
Janchey, Ivo 415

Janklow, Mort 436

Jardine, Francis 206
Jardine-Matheson 12, 13
Jaworski, Leon 189, 190, 198
Jenkins, Carl 212, 348, 349, 374
Jensen, D. Lowell 410

Jewish Telegraph Agency 90
JM/WAVE 161-163, 206, 210, 224, 349
John Birch Society 170, 293

John Paul II (Pope) 443

Johnson, Arthur 343, 373

Johnson, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” 355
Johnson, Lyndon 114, 121, 165, 355, 398
Johnson, Robert (Barr) 350, 406

Jones, Clifford 76, 184

Jordan, Hamilton 240, 241, 434

Jordan, Phil 290

Joseph E. Seagram's and Sons Limited 47
Joseph J. Cappucci Associates 208, 209, 210
Journal-American 133, 135

Jung, George 234

K

Kaftel, Frank 90

Kagalovsky, Konstantin 419

Kalish, Steven 282

Kaminsky, Sherman 61, 128

Kane, Patrick 101

Kanter, Burton 31-35, 85, 122, 352, 366, 367, 420
Karlweiss, George 231

Kattan, Isaac 246, 248

Katzenberg, Jacob 12

Kaufman, Susan 54, 56-59, 72

Kay, Sam 74, 75, 446

KCIA 149, 158, 182, 202

Keating, Charles 130, 357, 358, 375, 428
Keeler, Christine 131-133, 135
Kefauver Committee 48, $1, 60, 105, 108
Kelly, James P. 53

Kelso, Joe 233

Kemp, Jack 441, 446

Kendrick, Phil Jr. 368

Kennedy, Caroline 132

Kennedy family 56, 173

Kennedy, Joe 54

Kennedy, John F. 38, 56, 87, 121, 133, 134, 137, 152, 171, 194, 228

Kennedy, Robert F. 61, 67, 68, 115, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126 133, 173, 196, 402,
428

Kentucky Post 137

Kerry Commission 281, 290, 291, 340

Kessler, Murray 213, 262

Keswick, John Henry 13

Keswick, William Johnston “Tony” 13

Ketcham, Christopher 392

Keyser Ullman 242

KGB 300, 409, 412, 414, 415, 417, 420, 422

Khalifa bin-Salman al-Khalifa 372

Khan, A.Q. 270

Khan, Yahya 167

Khashoggi, Adnan 78, 79, 130, 150, 160, 221-223, 240, 241, 243, 257, 262, 276,
281, 286, 301-306, 308, 313, 335, 352, 372, 376, 394, 404, 406, 411, 439, 440,
443

Khoury, Sami 78, 79

Kim, Charles 172

Kimche, David 257, 285, 286

Kim Hyong-uk 149

King, Edward 26

King Energy 417, 431

King, John M. 287

King, Lawrence “Larry” 160, 190, 289, 445, 448, 453, 457

King, Martin Luther Jr. 126

Kinsey, Alfred C. 117

Kissinger Associates 319, 320, 321, 322, 443

Kissinger, Henry 89, 166-171, 177, 180, 196, 201, 229,
387, 402, 443

Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State 170

Klehr, Harvey 156, 194, 378

Klein, Bob 421

Kleinman, Morris 32

Klein, Theodore 323, 326

Ee
(06)
in
jr
—_—
a
(09)
N
N
(09)
(09)
É
(09)
CO
B

Klotz, John $8

Knightley, Phillip 132

Knowlton, Donald 152, 194, 277, 459
Koelsch, William 106

Kohlberg, Alfred 156

Kohn, Howard 283, 322, 325, 330, 331, 337, 338, 432
Kollek, Paul 82

Kollek, Teddy 82, 95

Komisar, Lucy 367, 377, 378

Konanykhine, Alexander 420

Koreagate scandal 149, 150, 154, 156, 158
Korshak, Sidney 25-27, 29, 30, 32, 39, 438, 459
Kray, Ronnie and Reggie 129-131, 146

Kroll and Associates 136

Kroll, Jules 136, 442, 443, 460

Krown, Kevin 241

Kryuchkov, Vladimir 412, 414, 415, 417

Kuhn, Loeb and Company 91

Kulukundis family 84, 96, 237, 238, 354
Kulukundis, Michael 84, 96, 237, 238, 354
Kuomintang (KMT) 10-12, 14, 16-21, 23, 38, 153, 155, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172
Kwitny, Jonathan 258, 369, 378

L

La Costa Club 31, 32, 352, 376

La Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) 290
Lady Ghislaine 299, 436

Laffite, Pierre 14, 15

La Nación 310, 336

Lance, Bert 235, 272-275, 277, 280, 316, 353, 358, 375, 377, 39S
Landon, Curt 21

Lanksy, Meyer 20, 48, 230

Lansburgh, Morris 75

Lansdale, Edward 155, 165, 172, 178

Lansing Foundation 140

Lansky, Meyer 2-5, Z 9, 12, 15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 47-49, S1, 53, 54, 58, 60,
62, 72, 75, Z6, 79, 85, 89, 94, 102, 103, 107, 108, 118, 121, 129, 133, 140, 142,
157, 162, 184, 185, 223, 265, 333, 342, 346, 438, 440

Lanza, Joseph “Joe Socks” 2

LaPlaca, Peter 248

Larsen, Norman 155, 156

Lasater, Dan 347, 348, 350, 362, 374, 376, 377

Lassiter, Olbert “Dick” Fearing 454, 455, 456, 457

Las Vegas Sun 118

Lavi, Hushang 313

Lavoie, Leonard F. 342, 343, 373, 428

Lay, Kenneth 371

League of Nations 11

Le Cercle 224, 225, 252, 281, 312

Ledeen, Michael 208, 256, 285, 286

Lee, Duncan 367

Leflang, Astrid 187

Lehder, Carlos 234, 282, 323

Lehman Brothers $3, 91, 111, 342

Lehrman, Lewis 289

Le Monde Diplomatique 22

Lenn, John 173

Lenzlinger, Iso 418

Lévéque, Jean-Maxime 308

Levinson, Ed 76, 172

Levy, Arthur 356, 375

Lewis, John 132

Lewis, “Snags” 186

Liberian Trade and Development Corp (TRADEVCO) 86

Libutti, Robert 350

Liddy, G. Gordon 174, 188, 197

Liedtke, Bill 216

Liedtke, J. Hugh 216

LIFE (magazine) 75, 76, 78, 127, 128, 145, 146

Lil Lori (Barbara Ralabate) 182

Lincoln Savings 357, 428

Lindner, Carl 215, 244, 456, 457, 463

Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) 217, 218, 261, 398, 399

Linsey, Joe 53

Lionel Corporation 111, 112, 121, 138, 144

Lippo Group 353, 360, 375

Livingstone, Neil 192, 209, 210, 259, 288

Lockwood, Paul 108, 143

Lodestar Inc 32

Lo Kham Thy 163

London & Overseas Freighters 84

Long, Huey 9

Lonrho P.L.C 219, 242, 243, 244, 302, 309, 335, 400, 402, 416
Lord Boothby 129, 130, 132, 146

Lorenzo, Frank 368

Los Angeles Times 35, 39, 40, 67, 146, 330, 336, 337, 357, 374-378, 425, 461
Loutchansky, Grigori 417, 418, 431

Lowers, Donald 209

LTV Electrosystems 398, 399

Luciano, Charles “Lucky” 2-5, 8-10, 12, 37, 47, 101, 102, 107, 142
Ludwig, Daniel K 219, 367

Lukas, Anthony 182, 197

Lundy, J.T. 350

Luo Menghong 10

Lvovsky, Anna 175, 196

M

MacArthur, Douglas 16, 136, 155, 156
Macauley, Robert 443, 444, 445
MacFarlane, Robert 284, 285

Macmillan, Harold 132, 134, 135, 194, 376
Madden, Owney 346

Mafia Kingfish 9, 38

Magruder, Jeb 188

Maher, Ted 424

Maheu, Robert 173, 402, 428

Mahl, Thomas 7, 8, 37, 38

“Main Core” 392, 393, 426

Mainland Savings 240, 301-304, 352

Major Realty 76, 77

Makkouk, Omar 78

Malnik, Alvin 185

Manafort, Paul 436

Manchester Guardian 415

Mandel, Georges 87

Mann, Stanley 35, 187, 401

Manor, LeRoy 369

Mantello, Georges 87, 89

Mao Zedong 153, 360

Marcello, Carlos 9, 38, 184, 213, 346

Marchetti, Victor 203

Marcos family 304, 366, 369, 403

Marcos, Ferdinand 369, 403, 428

Marcos, Imelda 304, 369, 443

Marcus, Bernard K 108-113

Marcus, Celia Cohen 111, 112

Marcus, Dora 100, 101, 106, 108, 110, 113

Marcus, Joseph 108

Marcus, Joseph S. 100, 106, 143

Marcus, Libby 113, 114

Marenches, Alexandre de 219, 225

Marina Reale 89

Marinelli, Albert 101, 102

Marissov, Andreas 418

Marrus, Michael 42, 44, 66

Marshall, Douglas 190, 191

Marshall, Jonathan 11, 32, 38, 39, 40, 76, 77, 78, 79, 94, 95, 96, 141, 148, 190, 191,
196, 198, 258, 259, 263, 265, 282, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337, 344, 373, 427,
459

Martinez, Eugenio 174, 177, 181, 188

Martin, Ron 296, 322, 325, 326

Marwan, Ashraf 243, 244

Mary Carter Paint Company 4, S, 37, 77, 104, 136

Maryland Maritime Co. 166

Mason, Raymond 236, 237, 238, 244

Masters of Deceit 64

Material Services Corporation 25

Mattei, Enrico 92

Mattes, John 349

Maurice L. Rothschild 140

Mavroleon, Basil “Bluey” 84

Mavroleon family 84

Mavroleon, Nicholas 84

Maxwell, Christine 130, 133, 242, 389, 426

Maxwell, Ghislaine 84, 130, 237, 299, 405, 436, 449, 458

Maxwell, Isabel 83, 387, 389

Maxwell, Kevin 413

Maxwell, Robert 79, 81, 83, 89, 94, 130, 136, 150, 156, 214, 231, 242, 243, 257,
260, 285, 294-296, 299, 308, 311, 313, 316, 333, 357, 381, 382, 386-390, 393,
394, 397, 403, 40S, 407, 409-413, 424-426, 429, 431, 436, 442, 449, 456

Mayfair Set, The 130, 146

Mazur, Susan 258, 280, 330

McBundy, William 118

McCallum, David 410

McCarthy, Glenn 137

McCarthy, Joseph 56, 99, 115-120, 122, 124, 142, 156, 160, 392

McCarthy, William 137

McClintock, Michael 165, 196

McCollum, William 348

McCord, James 173, 174, 176, 177, 181, 182, 184, 188

McCoy, Alfred 4, 12, 18, 37, 38, 162, 163, 195, 322, 325, 327

McDonald, Larry 293

McDonald, Miles 104, 105

McElroy, James 204

McFarlane, Robert 256, 257, 267, 286, 331, 333

McGowan, James 35, 68

McGregor, Jack 238, 239, 244

McLaughlin, Edward 58

McLendon, Gordon 183, 184
McManus, Michael 336, 364
McSweeney, William 409

M.D. Anderson Foundation 189
Media Bypass 396, 427

Meese, Edwin 286, 316, 377, 383-385, 389-391, 402, 403, 410, 413

Mega Group 25, 70, 116

Mellon, Ailsa 226, 227

Mellon family S, 33, 129

Mellon, Paul 227

Mena, Arkansas 340, 344, 345, 347-349, 351, 361, 373, 374, 377, 378, 401
Menzies, Stewart 6, 7

Mercantile Bank & Trust 273

MERRIMAC 176

Merthan, Lawrence 154

Metta, Michele 87, 91, 92, 96-98

Metzger, Eugene 274, 275, 395

Meyer, Cord 223, 224

MIS 82, 129, 132, 146

MI6 SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service 6, 131, 381, 382

Miami National Bank 21, 83, 157, 236

Miami News 71, 94

Middendorf Group 273, 274

Midwest Employers Casualty Company (MECC) 371

Milken, Michael 130, 246, 375, 443, 456

Millard, Mark 250, 266

Miller, Richard 289

Milliken, Roger 293

Mintz, John 399, 427

Mischer, Walter 213-216, 218, 219, 254,
Mitchell, “Billy” 186

Mitchell, John 449

Mitterand 308

MK-ULTRA 15, 174

Mogilevich, Semion 80, 81, 95, 382, 383, 414-416, 418, 419
Moldea, Dan 28, 29, 40, 459

ON
:
iS
N
in

Molina, John 326

Mollenhoff, Clark 168, 196

Mondale, Walter 410, 411, 430

Money and the Power, The 37, 103, 142, 195, 373

Monks, Vicky 283, 322, 325, 330, 331, 337, 338

Monroe, James 358

Monroe, Marilyn 56, 133, 171

Monsieur, Jacques 311, 336

Moody family 137, 239, 240, 241, 342

Moody Jr, Shearn 137, 157, 239, 241

Moody, William Lewis Jr. 137, 157, 239, 240, 241, 342, 368

Moorer, Thomas H. 167, 169-171, 179, 180, 228, 293

Morabia, Elliot 298

Morabia, Nan 298, 299, 333

Moran, James 104, 105

Morgan, Jeff 32, 40

Morgans 6, 226

Morgenthau, Robert 121, 122, 124, 125, 261, 269, 435, 442

Moriarty, John “Jack” 191, 192, 193, 338

Morris, Roger 37, 103, 142, 157, 195, 345, 347, 373, 374

Mossad 31, 7S, 83, 87, 88, 91, 9S, 96, 124, 145, 206, 209, 230, 243, 257, 283, 29S,
297, 305, 311-313, 336, 351, 383, 386, 387, 389, 397, 412-415, 422, 424, 425,
426, 439

Moss, Edward K. 222-224, 262, 290, 341, 343

Mosvold, Inge Gordon 367

Mountbatten, Lord Louis 13, 131

Mowrer, Edgar Ansel 8

Mulcahy, Kevin 204

Mullen, Robert R. 179

Mulligan, Henry L. 368

Multer, Abe 83

Multiponics 232, 233, 263, 455

Muolo, Paul 213, 259, 261, 334, 375, 376

Murchison, Clinton 83, 183, 184, 217, 261, 304, 342, 355, 359, 364, 402, 454, 462

Murchison, John 217, 261

Murdoch, Rupert 293, 294, 332, 435, 436, 440, 459

Murphy, Charles M. 102, 103

Murphy, Daniel 255, 393

Murphy, George 159

Music Corporation of America (MCA) 26, 28, 29, 31, 39, 40, 400-404, 409, 437,
438

N

Nahum, Sterling Henry 71, 131, 134

Nation, The 147, 364, 365, 377

National Bank of Georgia 272, 273, 274, 277, 353, 354

National Crime Syndicate 4, 48, 102, 103, 223

National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty 288, 289, 331, 352

National Enquirer 114, 144

National Review 136, 156, 228, 435

National Security Agency (NSA) 165, 166, 202, 253, 383, 388, 392, 393, 395,
396-398, 427, 462

National Security Council 27, 169, 170, 177, 178, 180, 228, 255, 284, 285, 316,
348, 364, 393, 395, 402, 411

National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) 228

Naylor, R.T. 21, 23, 39, 76, 95, 196, 230, 262, 308, 335, 378

NBC News 261, 306

Nelson, Rusty 453

Nesline, Joe 129, 184, 185, 186, 188, 198, 223

Newhouse, Si Jr. 113, 122, 135, 434, 435

Newman, Arno 124, 311

Newman, Peter 44, 49, 69, 87, 333

New Republic 142, 245, 264, 376, 416, 431

Newsweek 270, 325, 329, 439, 459

New West 26, 39, 438, 459

New York Daily News 142, 383, 435

New Yorker 113, 302, 435, 458

New York Herald Tribune 8, 435

New York Magazine 102, 142, 293, 332, 432, 435, 460

New York Post 293, 377, 437, 442, 460

443, 448-450, 455, 458-465
Nguyen Cao Ky 162, 163
Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO) 289, 290, 29
Nichols, John Philip 363, 364
Nichols, Larry 362
Nichols, Louis B. 64
Nichols, Mary 58
Nichols, Richard Booth 402, 403
Nightline 191

Nikitina, Galina 90, 91,9

Nir, Amiram 286

Nitzan, Jonathan 83, 95

Nitze, Paul 165

Nixon, Richard 89, 94, 151, 152, 154, 166-169, 172, 173, 177, 180, 183, 188, 189,
194, 196, 197, 201, 216, 228, 229, 232, 244, 245, 250, 260, 273, 285, 293, 314,
319, 320, 352, 356, 382, 392, 443, 449

N.M. Rothschild 369

Nordex 417, 418, 419

Noriega, Manuel 209, 234, 259, 282, 283, 284, 323, 330, 350

Normandie 1

Norman, James 395, 397, 398, 427

North, Oliver 226, 228, 255, 256, 259, 284, 286, 306, 308, 311, 316, 327, 334,
338, 339, 344, 347, 348, 351, 391, 426, 447

Novaya Gazeta 423, 432

Novel, Gordon 60

Novotny, Mariella (Stella Marie Capes) 134

Nugan Hand Bank 203, 369

Nunez, Moises 233

Nye, Joseph S. Jr. 449, 461

N

O

Oakland Tribune 32, 40

Obama, Barack 30

Ober 176

O'Brien, Larry 172, 181, 188

Observer 198, 219, 261, 296, 333

Occidental Petroleum 236, 237, 273, 274, 409, 447

Ocean Hunter 289, 290, 295

Ochoa, Jorge 340

O'Connell, Frank 224, 261, 404

O'Connor, John 442

"October Surprise” 80, 214, 225, 251, 252, 253, 255, 257, 267, 281, 313, 336, 391,
404, 428

Odlum, Floyd 28, 29, 151

O'Dwyer, William 103, 104, 105, 114, 136

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 272, 273, 314

Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI 1, 2, 5, 8, 165

Office of Policy Coordination (OPC 19

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 5-9, 13, 14, 16-18, 20, 29, 34, 37, 39, 60, 61, 85,
88, 93, 118, 129, 132, 135, 136, 155, 163, 201, 221, 222, 226-229, 233, 245,
250, 257, 261, 262, 266, 292, 352, 367, 378

Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) 6, 7

Oil and Petroleum Year Book 90, 97

Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century, The 395, 427
Ojjeh, Akram 308, 313, 335

Olayan, Suliman 320

Oliver, R. Spencer 181, 186

Olmsted, George 86, 273

Omaha Sun 445, 446
Omaha World Herald 160, 190, 446, 447, 448, 461
O'Neill, John Patrick 413

Operation Black Eagle 281, 283, 284, 288, 296, 297, 322, 334
Operation BLUEBIRD 174

Operation CHAOS 175, 176, 347

Operation Condor 386, 399, 405

Operation Midnight Climax 15

Operation Mongoose 161, 178
Operation Moses 313
Operation Paper 18, 39, 155, 194
Operation Underworld 2, 3, 5, 8, 14, 107

Ora Group 295, 296

Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem 88, 265
Orovitz, Max 76, 77
O'Sullivan, Shane 176, 196, 197
Oswald, Lee Harvey 137, 183
Owen, Alisha 448

Owen, George 183, 184, 185

Owen, Robert 183, 184, 185, 288, 289, 290, 299, 327, 331, 349
P

Paese Sera 92, 98

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 79, 209, 283, 386
Palmer, Allan George 32, 33, 291, 352

Palmeri, Ernest 248

Palmer, Michael B. 290

Palmer National Bank 352

Papa, Michele 235

Park, Max 400

Park-On-Meter, Inc (POM) 362-365

Park, Frank and Libbie 87

Park, Tongsun 136, 149, 150, 154, 156, 158, 159, 164, 172, 188, 194, 195
Parry, Robert 157, 293, 294, 332, 338, 437, 459
Parvin-Dohrmann 157

Pasternak, Irving 138

Pastora, Eden 363

Patman, J.W. Wright 456

Patriots and Profiteers 308, 335

Patten, Joseph 216, 260

Pearson, Anthony 295

Pearson, Drew 118, 133

Pearson, Roger 292

Peck, David 120, 145

Peers, William R. 17

Pelullo, Leonard 247, 248, 265, 266, 303
Pemex 205, 206

Pender, George K. 364

Penn Central 215, 408, 429, 454-457, 462, 463
Pepper, Claude 236

Pepsi 154, 172, 218

Pereira, Jorge 273

Pereire, Francois 89, 90

Perelman, Ronald 368, 441

Peres, Shimon 69, 74, 82, 83, 87, 96, 286, 315, 316
Pergamon-Brassey 413, 414
Pergamon Press 381, 382, 387, 388, 413, 414, 426,
Permindex 87-92, 97, 140

Perpich, Rudy 409, 410, 411

Perry, Harry 101

Persico, Joseph 227, 229, 253, 254, 262, 264, 267
Persky, Gideon 82

Phao Siyanan 18, 83
Pharaon, Ghaith 274, 277, 278, 279, 318, 371
Philadelphia Enquirer 58

Philby, Kim 175

Phillips, David Atlee 176, 183

Phillips, Lazarus 87

Phillips, Maurice 89, 97

Phoenix Program 164, 341, 342, 384, 401
Picciotto, Edgar de 301

Picciotto, Michael de 300, 301, 334
Pickens, T. Boone 368, 447

Piderit, Fred 112, 144

Pike Committee 451
Pilgrim, Michael 192
Pinochet, Augusto 165, 292
Pires, Manuel J. 313

Pisar, Samuel 316, 409, 416

Pisello, Salvatore 438

Pitts, Henry Preston 154

Pizzo, Stephen 213, 259, 261, 334, 375, 376

Player, Sheldon 343

Plaza Hotel 56-60, 63, 117, 128, 182, 442

Poisoning for Profit 249, 266

Pola-Lite 139

Polstra, Klaus Uilke 85

Pope, Generoso (Gene) Jr. 114-116, 434

Pope, Generoso Sr. 114

Posey, Thomas 292, 344

Posner, Victor 246, 247, 265, 367

Power House, The 151, 194, 195, 199, 267, 331

Power Shift 23, 39

Powers, Richard 191-193

Pratt, Albert 71, 151

Presser, Jackie 192

Price, Robert 411

Prince Charles 131

Prince Philip 131, 146

Pritzker, J.B. 30

Pritzker, Nicholas and Thomas 30, 31, 32, 439

Pritzker, Penny 30

Profits of War 295, 332, 333, 337, 428

Profumo Affair 33, 128, 146, 171, 227, 277

Profumo, John 33, 128, 131-133, 135, 146, 171, 227, 277

Project ARTICHOKE 174

PROMIS scandal 210, 257, 285, 293, 363, 38S, 389, 402, 405-407, 413

PROMIS software 210, 214, 243, 257, 285, 293, 338, 362-364, 376, 383,-395,
397, 402-407, 410-414, 425, 426, 433

Proskauer, Joseph S. 107, 108, 109, 111

Przedborski, Daniel 310

Przedborski, Felix 310-313, 335, 416, 422

Pugo, Boris 417

Pullman, John 76, 162

Purdy, Donald 191, 192

Purple Gang 47
Puzo, Mario 114
Pynchon, Thomas 230

Q

Quasha, Alan and Wayne 368, 369
Quasha, William 368-370

Quayle, Dan 288

Quintero, Rafael 162, 206, 212, 323

R

Rabb, Maxwell 440

Raborn, William 398, 399

Racz, Andrew 401, 402

Radar 392

Radford, Charles 167, 169-172, 179

Raichle, Frank 123

RAND Corporation 30

Ranieri, Lewis 352

Ransom, L.T. “Bill” 400, 401, 428

Raphael, Bruce 216, 417, 431

Rapid-American Corporation 65, 247, 456

Rappaport, Bruce 34, 80-86, 89, 95, 97, 230, 237, 280, 292, 310, 312, 315-317,
336, 353-356, 377, 416, 419-421, 424

Rathbone, Monroe J. 454

Rattikone, Ouane 162

Raymond, Walter 393

Reagan, Nancy 437

Reagan, Ronald 28, 29, 40, 74, 80, 159, 160, 170, 218, 221, 224, 225, 234, 241,
244, 247, 252-255, 257-259, 264, 284, 286, 288, 289, 294, 306, 314, 316, 317,
319, 320, 328, 331, 333, 336, 350, 352, 357, 363, 364, 367, 374, 382-384, 387,
393, 395, 402, 428, 433-439, 441, 443, 446, 447, 450, 451, 452, 459, 462

Reeder, G. Wayne 363, 364, 376, 377

Reed, Terry 207, 258, 347, 350, 363, 366, 374

Regan, Edward 441, 459

Reinfeld, Joseph 50, 51, 52, 53
Reinhardt, Dietrich 345, 374

Renda, Mario 221, 302, 303, 304, 352, 376
Renyi, Thomas 419, 421

Republic National Bank (RNB) 95, 298, 299, 300, 310, 416, 422, 425
Research Institute of America 226

Research on Demand 389

Resorts International 4, 77, 104, 136, 137, 229

Revell, Oliver “Buck” 327

Reynolds, Mercer III 371

Reynolds, William Bradford 393

R.G. LeTourneau Inc 215, 260

Riady, James T. 353

Riady, Mochtar 353-355, 358, 359, 360, 361, 375, 376
Ricciardi, J.H. 456

Rice, Condoleezza 216, 411

Richards, Guy 135

Richards, Jack 401

Richardson, Sid 355, 396, 397, 427, 462

Richemont Group 368, 370

Richler, Mordecai 44, 49

Rich, Marc 124, 206, 312, 317, 318, 417, 418, 431, 439
Riconosciuto, Michael 338, 364, 365, 377, 390, 391, 402, 404
Riddle, John 331, 351, 375, 429

Riggs Bank 217, 261

Rikan, Erika “Heidi” (Cathy Dieter ) 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188
Riklis, Meshulam 65, 140, 141, 247, 265, 456

Rimrock International 77

Ritter, Bruce 441-445, 460

Roberts, John 304

Robertson, Terence 48, 49, 55

Rocka, Ludwig 369

Rockefeller Commission 174, 196

Rockefeller, David 6, 37, 228, 448

Rockefeller family 86, 96, 170, 218, 227, 356, 454

Rockefeller Foundation 11, 38

Rockefeller, Godfrey A. 370, 378

Rockefeller, Laurance 370

Rockefeller, Nelson 6, 228, 348, 351, 370

Rodriguez, Cesar 282

Rodriguez, Felix 162, 210, 323-325, 327, 339,

Rodriguez, Gilberto 404

Rodriguez, Luis 234, 289

Rodriguez, Paul 453, 462

Roe, Kenneth 364, 377

Roen, Allard 32, 122, 138

Rogers, David 287, 331

Rogers & Wells 244-247, 249, 251, 354

Rogers, William D. 322

Rogers, William P. 244

Rolling Stone 283, 322, 330

Roosevelt, Eleanor 104

Roosevelt, James 29, 31

Roosevelt, John 29

Roosevelt, Franklin (FDR) 6-8, 19, 24, 25, 66, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 114, 142,
154, 157, 222, 381

Rose, Charlie 406

Rose Law 358, 359, 361, 362, 364, 394, 395

Roselle, Crescent “Chris” J. 248, 249

Roselli, Johnny 26, 27, 184, 223

Rosenbaum, Tibor 75, 76, 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 97, 230, 231, 263

Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 115, 463

Rosenstiel, Lewis 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, SS, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67,
68, 72, 108, 116, 127, 128, 140, 141, 247, 442, 456

Rosenthal, Abe 147, 324, 435

Rossotti, Barbara 207

Ross, Vaughn R. “Bobby” 211, 221, 259

Rothkopf, Lou 32

Rothschild, Edmund L. 332, 338, 369, 382

Rothschild Inc 357

Rothstein, Arnold 12, 59, 101

Rothstein, James 59

Rowland, Roland Walter (Tiny) 130, 219, 242-244, 301,
416

Ruark, Robert 221, 261

Rubin, Robert 365, 366

Ruby, Jack (Jacob Rubenstein ) 137, 183, 184

Rudy, John 187

Rugge, Sue 387, 388

Rumsfeld, Donald 314, 315, 317, 336

Rupert, Antony 368, 370

Ruppert, Michael 22, 24, 39, 395, 427

Russell, Louis James 146, 172, 173, 178, 182, 183, 197, 227-229, 233, 250, 333,
349

Russo, Anthony 211

Russo, Gus 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 39, 40, 178, 197, 198, 459

Rutkin, James 51

Ryan, Clendenin 136, 142, 147

Ryan, Frank T. 29, 221

Ryan, Ray 261

;
;
=
f

S

Sadat, Anwar 210

Safari Club 219-225, 252, 262, 274
Safire, William 434, 435, 436, 441, 450
Safra, Edmond 79, 81, 9S, 298-301, 310, 311, 382, 416, 422, 423, 424, 440
Sahara Hotel 342

Sale, Kirkpatrick 23, 24, 39

Salem, Hussein K. 207

Salerno, Ralph 62, 112, 185, 192, 434
Salik, Pierre 311

Salon 67, 260, 392, 426, 461

Samos, Steven Sandor 303, 304, 334
Samuels, David 104, 142

Sanders, Chris 22, 39

Sanders, Jerry 201, 258

Santulli, Richard 457, 463

Sapio, Carmine de 115, 121

Sassoon family 12, 13, 38

Sassoon, James 13

SAVAK 205, 210, 219, 255, 408

Saypol, Irving 115

Scarfo, Nicodemo 247

SCA Services 248, 249

Schenley Distillers Company 52-54, 56, 64, 65, 67, 72, 108, 141

Schifferli, Pierre 292, 310

Schindler, Irving 73

Schine, David 116, 119

Schine, Renee 116, 144

Schlein, Dov 422

Schmidt, Robert D. 409

Schneider, Stephen 51, 66, 363, 376, 429

Schoenfield, Gerald 440

Schreiber, Taft 28

Schwartz, Irwin “Steve” 73

Schwimmer, Adolf 73, 82, 286, 297, 298, 302-304

Scott, John 49

Scott, Peter Dale 14, 16, 38, 39, 40, 94, 133, 135, 146, 147, 153, 155, 156, 194,
195, 197, 198, 223, 258, 259, 262, 263, 265, 282, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337,
338, 344, 373, 426, 427, 454, 462, 463

Scowcroft, Brent 319, 320

Screen Actors Guild (SAG) 28

Sculley, John 411

Seabury, Samuel 102, 103

Seagram's Seagram Company Limited 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 66, 319

Seal, Barry (Adler Barriman) 213, 341, 342-344, 347, 349, 352, 428

SEA Supply 18, 20, 21, 155, 157, 307, 308

Seaton, Fred 150, 151

Secord, Richard 163, 165, 195, 204, 206, 208, 226, 254, 255, 284, 285, 287, 298,
299, 307, 316, 322-324, 326, 327, 333

Secret Agenda 159, 183, 195-198

Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, The 132, 146

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 229, 232, 233, 245, 246, 247, 275,
301, 378, 396

Semenenko, Serge 140, 141

Seng Heng Bank 360, 376

Sennott, Charles M. 442, 443, 460

Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External
Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service or SDECE) 219

SETCO Aviation 290

Sevareid, Eric 449

Seymour, Cheri 338, 364, 376, 391, 397, 403, 404, 426

Seymour, Christine 437

Shackley, Theodore “Ted” 161-166, 178, 192, 202-208, 210, 212, 213,
225, 228, 235, 242, 244, 252-258, 267, 280, 281, 284, 285, 288, 292, 309, 312,
323-325, 349, 369, 374, 400, 401, 408

Shaheen, John 80, 250-252, 257, 281, 330

Shakarchi, Mahmoud 300

Shakarchi, Mohammed 300, 311

Shamir, Nachum 386

Shamir, Yitzhak 383, 386, 425

Shawano Corporation 137, 138

Shaw, Clay 87, 96-98

Sheehan, Daniel 348

Shenker, Morris 32, 157, 211

Sherwood, John 164

Sherwood, Robert 7

Shiina, Motoo 448, 449

Shiliro, Lewis 422

Shimon, Joseph 173, 198

Shimon, Toni 173

Shoffler, Carl 177, 182, 191-193

Shogan, Robert 101, 103, 142

Shorrock, Tim 392, 393, 426

Shultz, George P. 314-316, 320, 336, 337, 356

Sick, Gary 313, 336

Sicre, Ricardo 221, 222, 261

Siegelbaum, Benjamin 76

Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy” 3, 4, 20, 72, 226, 342,
Silent Coup 183, 196, 197, 1

Simons, Howard 177, 179

Simon, William 68, 196, 197, 245, 320

Singer, Saul 106, 109, 110, 144

4,
198

Singlaub, John 17, 163, 201, 291-294, 296, 327, 344, 352, 357

Siragusa, Charles 14

Skuratov, Yury 423, 432

Smallwood, Joey 250

Smith, Al 101, 102, 107, 108

Smith, Gerald 215, 216

Smith, James H. 454

Smith, Randall Jr. 456

Smith, Richard Harris 5, 6, 37, 250, 266, 378
Snider, Steven 129, 131, 132, 135, 146, 147, 222,
Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) 82
Sofigest 85

Soghanalian, Sarkis 325

Sokolsky, George 63, 435

Somoza, Anastasio 74, 94, 445

Sonneborn, Rudolf 70, 71, 94

Soong, T. V. 19, 153, 154

Sorge, Santo 77

Soros, George 301, 370, 372

Soros, Paul 301

Soros, Peter 301

Soustelle, Jacques 92, 97

262

Southern Air Transport 20, 154, 218, 287, 297, 299,

457
Southern Cross Aviation Inc 344, 345

304, 339, 350, 365, 408, 444,

Sovereign Military Order of Malta (better known as the Knights of Malta) 88,

226, 245, 313, 416, 444, 445
Special Interrogation Group (SIG) 81
Special Operations Executive (SOE) 6, 13
Specter, Arlen 441
Spellman, Cardinal 56, 57, 116, 117, 122, 442

Spence, Craig 37, 445, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 462
Spiegel 309, 335

Spire, Robert 448

Spooks 94, 95, 229, 262, 263, 265, 330
Sporkin, Stanley 232, 247, 265

Stacher, Doc 27

Stajer, Sidney 12

Standorf, Alan 393, 405, 429

Stanford, Phil 183, 184, 187, 197
Stanford Technology Trading Group International (STIGI) 285
Starnes, E. Trine 289, 331

Starr, Cornelius Vander 367

Starr, Ken 396

Stavin, Richard 403, 404

St. Clair, Jeffrey 347, 374

STDM (compnay) 360

Steinberg, Saul 368, 382, 456, 463
Steinbrenner, George 440

Stein, Julius Caesar 26, 29, 31, 438
Stephens, Inc 273

Stephens, Jackson 273, 353, 358, 361, 362, 366, 368, 371, 394, 395, 396
Stephens, Louis 252

Stephenson, William 6, 7, 14, 37, 88
Sterling, Claire 131, 134, 416, 430, 431
Stettinius, Edward Jr. 222

Stewart, Jimmy 454

Stewart, John 172

Stewart, Robert H. III 218

Stillman, James 96, 227

Stirling, David 130

St. Joe Paper Company 236, 237, 326
Stobaugh, James 362

Stoga, Alan 321

Stone, Robert G. 370

Stone, Roger 436, 458

Strong, Morgan 210, 259

Studio $4 241, 434, 458
Studley, Barbara 294, 296
Sturgis, Frank 174, 177

Summers, Anthony 54, 58, 60, 62, 67, 68, 129, 132, 133, 135, 146,

Summit Aviation 291, 341

Sunday Times 75, 244

Sundlun, Bruce 454-457

Supermob 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 39, 40, 116, 140, 141, 148, 459
Swig, James 29

Swiss-Israel Trade Bank 82, 88

Swords, Shawn 438

Symington, Stuart 275

Systematics Inc. 274, 275, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398

System Services International (SSI) 205, 206, 207, 208

T

Tafoya, Eugene 204, 208

Talbot, David 117-119, 145, 425

Tamraz, Roger 251

Task Force 157 (TF-1$7) 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 180, 189, 196,
253

Taubman, A. Alfred 74, 258, 259, 385, 410, 444

Taylor, Rufus 165

Teacher, David 225, 262

Tempelsman, Maurice 356

Terpil, Frank 159, 204, 374

Terrell, Jack (“Colonel Flaco”) 326, 327, 338, 344

Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG) 327

Terry, Howard L. 215

Tessler, Allan 385

Tetra Tech 225, 281, 330

Texas Monthly 189, 198, 215, 260, 261

Thatcher, Margaret 130, 242, 264, 318, 337, 382

Thatcher, Mark 318, 337

Thayer, Charles 116

The Limited 20, 385, 445, 457

Thieves World 416, 430

Thomas, Clarence 446

Thomas, E. Parry 157

Thomas, Gordon 94, 214, 257, 260, 299, 333, 386, 389, 390, 412, 414, 417, 425

Thommasson, Bob 344

Thompson, Arthur 338

Thompson, Clark W. 156, 157

Thompson, Douglas 129, 146

Thunderbird Hotel 342

Thurmond, Strom 441

Tibbets, Paul 454, 455, 457, 462, 463

Tieri, Frank 249

TIME (magazine) 40, 49, 66, 68, 107, 119, 185, 269, 271, 329, 375, 431

Todd, Troy 190

Tolson, Clyde 60, 67, 118

Torrente, Vivian 424

Tourine, Charles 72, 185, 223

Tower, John 156, 194, 214, 216, 218, 285, 286, 294, 318, 332, 387, 403, 40S, 413,
414, 429, 430

Towers, Harry Alan 134

Townsend, Jerry 316, 356

Tracey, Harold 131

Trafficante, Santo 54, 75, 162, 163, 185, 213, 223

Trento, Joseph 158, 161, 210, 219, 235, 254, 255, 258, 261, 285, 324

Trento, Susan 151, 154, 159, 192, 253, 267, 459

Trilateral Commission 201, 444, 448, 449, 461

Tripp, C. A. 117

Trippe, Juan 222

Trohan, Walter 119

Trotter, Jack T. 215, 216

Truell, Peter 280, 329, 330, 333, 335, 379, 427

Truman, Harry 39, 73, 74, 94, 104, 105, 114, 152, 459

Trump, Donald 39, 94, 99, 144-146, 207, 247, 262, 265, 332, 334, 383, 426, 434,
435, 436, 439, 440, 458, 459

Tucker, Sam 32

Turki bin Faisal al Saud 219
Turner, Stansfield 205

U

Uffner, George 12

Ugazzi, Mario 92, 98

Ulloa, Herrera 310

Unification Church 172, 202, 292, 293, 296, 343, 444
Union Bancaire Privée 300, 301

Union Bank of Switzerland 296, 369, 370, 371, 372, 420
United Brands 74, 444, 457

United Dye 122, 123, 136-140, 438

United Fruit Company 28, 74, 444, 460

Ustinov, Peter 449

V

V230

Valentine, Douglas 13, 38, 39, 94, 95

Vance, Cyrus 178

vanden Huevel, Frederich 381

Vanderwerker, John 363

Vang Pao 163, 349

Vanity Fair 113, 424, 432, 434, 435, 458, 459

Van Tuyl, George C. Jr. 107

Varona, Tony 223

Vaveris, George 414

Vesco, Robert 36, 40, 179, 229-234, 237-242, 244, 246, 2
296, 400, 401

Videnieks, Peter 405

Viguerie, Richard 202, 207

Village Voice, The 425, 442

Vineberg, Stanley 87, 89

Vinson, Henry 452, 453, 462

Viola, Thomas 249

Vogue 113, 435

von Hoffman, Nicholas 62, 68, 100, 112, 113, 115, 119, 122, 125, 128, 142-146,
195, 435, 458

Voyatzis, Jean 14

W

Wackenhut (G4S Security) 338, 363, 364, 390, 398, 402, 427

WACL 357

Wade, Rick 348, 349

Wadman, Robert 448

Walker, George Herbert 131

Walker, Jimmy 102

Wallace, George 346

Wallach, Robert 316

Wall Street Journal 97, 217, 259, 261, 287, 331, 349, 374, 375, 377, 429

Walsh, Frank 127, 249, 250, 322, 324, 325

Walsh, Neil 127

Walters, Barbara 434-436, 458

Walters, Vernon 256

Wanta, Leo 416, 430, 431

Warburg, Felix 108

Warburg, Paul 108, 110, 143

Ward, Seth Jr. 362, 363

Ward, Stephen 131-135, 146, 171

Warner, Marvin 28, 141, 248, 331, 373, 420, 431

Warton, Henry A. 345

Washington Post 37, 40, 64, 68, 96, 147, 154, 161, 177, 179, 194, 195, 199, 209,
241, 259, 264, 275, 330, 331, 333, 335-337, 340, 359, 363, 368, 373, 375, 376,
378, 399, 411, 427-430, 462

Washington Star 40, 67, 187, 188, 195, 260, 373, 427, 446

Washington Times 293, 343, 450-453, 462

Wasserman, Lew 26, 27, 28, 29, 40, 402, 409, 437, 438, 459

Watson, Samuel 339, 409

Webb, Del 342, 343

Webb, Gary 137, 147, 263, 363, 376

Weinberger, Caspar 314, 315
Weisel, Edwin 113, 114
Weisman, Leonard 71
Weitz, John 60

Welander, Robert O. 169-171, 179, 180
Welch, Russell 344, 349
Weld, William F. 393, 394
Wells, Alfred 132
Wells, John A. 244
Wells, Maxine 68, 181, 195, 335
Wenger, Beth S. 107, 143, 144
WerBell, Mitchell III 229
Weschler, Harry 397, 398
West S7th 327
Western Goals 293

Wexner, Leslie 20, 25, 70, 74, 140, 216, 244, 246, 249, 250, 385, 410, 420, 439,

440, 444, 445, 447, 450, 457
WEC Corporation 326, 334
Wheaton, Gene 212, 348, 349, 374
Where's My Roy Cohn? 100, 142
White, Bill 277, 278
White, George 5, 14, 16, 38
White, John C. 240, 241
Whitlam, Gough 203
Wick, Chad 293, 294, 434
Wien, Lawrence 24, 140
Wigg, George 132
Willauer, Whiting 19
Williams, E. Bennett on
Williams, Garland 13-17
Williams, Leroy 190, 193, 199
Williams, Leroy Jr. 190
Willoughby, Charles 16, 136, 155, 156, 170

Wilson, Edwin P. 84, 150, 153, 158-161, 163-166, 170, 171, 180, 188-192, 2

206, 208-212, 219, 223, 224, 238, 243, 244, 255, 285, 30

400, 408

Wilson, J. Steven 238

Wingate, Orde Charles 70

Winkler, Leslie 303

Winter, Allen 342, 430

Wired 385, 392, 425

Wisner, Frank 19

Wohlenhaus, James 240, 241

Wood, John H. Jr. 347

Woodward, Bob 179, 180, 181
Woolston-Smith, A. J. 173, 178

Work, Charles 405, 429

World Anti-Communist League 288, 292, 293, 310, 312, 332
World Bank 222, 279, 404, 406, 407, 410, 411
World Commerce Corporation (WCC) 29, 155, 222, 262
World Jewish Congress 88

World Marine Inc. 166, 203

World Wildlife Fund (WWE) 370

World Zionist Congress 75

World Zionist Organization (WZO) 70
Worthen Bank 360, 361, 362, 372, 376, 379
Wynne, Bedford 183-185, 463

Y

Yakuza 403, 413

Yassin, Hassan 281

Yavlinski, Grigori 415

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) 136
Yuesheng, Du 10

Z

Zagri, Sid 125, 126

Zapata Petroleum 153, 215, 216
Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan 270
Zeckendorf, William 140

Zell, Samuel 366, 367

Zemurray, Samuel 74

Zhou Enlai 169, 360

Zicarelli, Joseph “Bayonne Joe” 72, 73, 74, 90, 94, 95, 97, 127
Ziffren, Paul 27, 29, 31, 409

Zim Shipping 88

Z Magazine 370, 378

Zokosky, Peter 402

Zoppi, Rolando 85

ZR/MAJOR 223, 224
ZR/RIFLE 161

Zucker, Willard 286, 287, 298, 29
Zwillman, Longy 27, 47, 50, 51

NO

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACUSR - American Committee on US-Soviet Relations
ADFA - Arkansas Development Finance Authority

AFL-CIO - American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial
Organizations

AIA - Aviation Industries Association

AIFLD - American Institute of Free Labor Development
AIG - American International Group

ANICO - American National Insurance Company
AREB - All-Russian Exchange Bank

BCCI - Bank of Credit and Commerce International
BCP - Banque de Commerce et de Placements

BNL - Banca Nazionale del Lavoro

BONY - Eastern European Division of Bank of New York
BONY-IMB - Bank of New York-Inter Maritime Bank
BSC - British Security Coordination

BWC - Bank of World Commerce

CAT - Civil Air Transport

CCC - Commercial Credit Corporation

CDC - Control Data Corporation

CIA - Central Intelligence Agency

CMA - Civilian Materiel Assistance

CMC - Centro Mondale Commerciale

COG - Continuity of Government

COI — Office of the Coordinator of Information

COP - Chiefs of Police National Drug Task Force
CORDS - Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support

CORU - Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations
CPD - Committee on the Present Danger

CRP - Committee for the Reelection of the President

DEA - US Drug Enforcement Administration

DFS - La Dirección Federal de Seguridad

DIA - Defense Intelligence Agency

DNC - Democratic National Committee

DOD - Department of Defense

DOJ - Department of Justice

EATSCO - Egyptian-American Air Transport and Services Corporation
EJA - Executive Jet Aviation

ERA - Engineering Research Associates

EUB - European Union Bank

FABCO - First Arkansas Bankstock Corporation

FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation

FBN - Federal Bureau of Narcotics

FGB - Financial General Bankshares (aka First American Bankshares)
FIDCO - First Intercontinental Development Corporation
GMT - GeoMili Tech Consultants Corporation

HUMINT - Nitze’s program for a naval human intelligence
IAHC - Italo-American Hotel Corporation

IAI - Israel Aerospace Industries

IAI — Israel Aircraft Industries

ICB - International Credit Bank

ICLR - International Computerized Land Research

IDEA - Institute for Democracy, Education, and Assistance
IDF - Israel Defense Force

IFMA - International Fund for Mergers and Acquisitions

IMB - Inter Maritime Bank

IOS - Investors Overseas Services

IRS - Internal Revenue Service

IRT - International Research and Trade

KMT - Nationalist Chinese the Kuomintang

LTV - Ling-Temco-Vought

MCA - Music Corporation of America

MECC - Midwest Employers Casualty Company
NAR - North American Resources

NHAQ - Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office
NSA - National Security Agency

NSC - National Security Council

NSIC - National Strategy Information Center

NVA - North Vietnamese Army

OMB - Office of Management and Budget

ONI - Office of Naval Intelligence

OPC - Office of Policy Coordination

OSG - Operations Sub-Group

OSS - Office of Strategic Services

PEC - Palestine Economic Corporation

PIIC — Pergamon International Information Corporation
PLO - Palestine Liberation Organization

RNB - Republic National Bank

SAG - Screen Actors Guild

SAT - Southern Air Transport

SDECE - France's External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service
SDNY - Southern District of New York

SEC - Securities and Exchange Commission

SGS - Société Générale de Surveillance

SIG - Special Interrogation Group

SOE - Special Operations Executive

SSI — System Services International

STIG - Stanford Technology Trading Group International
TF-157 — Task Force 157

TIWG - Terrorist Incident Working Group
TRADEVCO - Liberian Trade and Development Corp
UFG - United Financial Group

WCC - World Commerce Corporation

WWE - World Wildlife Fund

YAF - Young Americans for Freedom

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ie and foremost, Id like to extend my deepest and sincerest thanks to Ed

Berger, without whom this book would not have been possible. Ed
contributed amazing, in-depth and original research to several key parts of this
book and his contributions were and are invaluable. If you enjoy historical deep
dives about the intersection of organized crime networks, corporate power and
intelligence agencies, please consider listening to and supporting his podcast: The
Pseudodoxology Podcast Network at https://www.patreon.com/wydna

I also want to thank my amazing assistant Star Parsons for helping keep my
website afloat while I worked on this book and for painstakingly formatting all the
many, many citations within this book. I also owe much to my publisher Kris
Millegan for his infinite patience and understanding, as this book was delayed
several times, and for his support of my work. Also, an important thank you to
Johnny Vedmore who made some important contributions to this book and
whose original past reporting on the Epstein case was key to developing
important parts of this book.

In addition, this work, and my journalistic career in general, would not have
been possible if not for Mnar Muhawesh and the team at MintPress News. Mnar
and the MintPress team first gave me the space and platform necessary to develop
my journalistic work and provided me with the support I needed to publish my
original, four-part series on which this book is based. Thank you so much for
believing in me and for supporting my work from the very beginning — I owe you
all so much.

I also would like to thank my amazing babysitters, Fresia Retamal and Patricia
Guzman, for taking great care of my little ones so that I could put in the time to
write this book.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my deepest, heartfelt thanks to all of
my supporters, specifically the thousands of readers who financially support my
work, allowing me to be 100% independent. Without your support, this book
would not have happened and I cannot thank you enough for your help in
nancing this book as well as in supporting and sharing my other work,
both online and in print.

ONE NATION UNDER Fa
ely,

Exposes vastly under-explored topics compared to
other media reports and books on Jeffrey Epstein

ow did Jeffrey Epstein manage to evade justice for

decades? Who enabled him and why? Why were legal

Officials told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and
to back off during his first arrest in the mid-2000s?

Volume 1 of One Nation Under Blackmail traces the origin of the n
behind Jeffrey Epstein and his ciates to the merc of orga

Wie

crime and in nce networks during Wo ar Il and follows t

most notable a ties through the de
of corruption and other crime
lving sex
ch have sub
of Americ important institutions for their bene and to the
detriment of the public

The sordid union between Intelligence and
Organized Crime ion gave rise to Jefirey Epeen )

ONEN

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey
Epstein, Volume Two.
Copyright © 2022 Whitney Webb. All Rights Reserved.

Published by:

Trine Day LLC

PO Box $77
Walterville, OR 97489
1-800-556-2012

www. IrineDay.com
trineday@icloud.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945 124

Webb, Whitney

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey
Epstein, Volume Two.— Ist ed.

p. cm.

Epub (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-303-2

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-302-5

1. Epstein, Jeffrey, -- 1953-2019. 2. Epstein, Jeffrey, -- 1953-2019 -- Friends and associates. 3. Extortion --
United States 1940-2022. 3. Organized Crime -- United States. 5. Organized Crime -- Canada. 6. Intelligence
services -- United States. 7. Espionage. 8. POLITICAL SCIENCE / Corruption & Misconduct. 9.
Truthfulness and falsehood -- Political aspects. 10. Espionage -- Israel -- United States. 11. Sex scandals --
Political aspects -- United States. 12. TRUE CRIME / Sexual Assault. I. Title First Edition

First Edition
10987654321

Distribution to the Trade by:
Independent Publishers Group (IPG)
814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

312.337.0747

www.ipgbook.com

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

For although the act condemn the doer, the end may justify him...
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses: I, 9, 1531

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
[laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things
like that.

- Henry Kissinger, Memorandum of Conversation, March 10, 1975

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.

— [S}enior adviser to Bush, Ron Suskind, New York Times, 2004

Government by blackmail is incompatible with democracy.
— Jerrold Nadler, The Huffington Post, October 7, 2013

Lo” have mercy — and as God knows - we could use some!

After running around this blue ball for nigh on seventy-three years and
moving in some strange circles, I reckoned I had seen, heard and read about most
everything.

But the depth and breadth of Whitney Webb’s opus, A Nation Under
Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey
Epstein, exceeded my expectations. Matter-of-fact, Whitney delivered two books,
over 900 fact-filled pages of exposé, exploring a netherworld nexus of criminals,
scammers, drug-dealers, bagmen, intelligence agents, government operatives and
political fixers.

How did this corruption happen? How did it seep so far into our body politic?
What can we the people do?

TrineDay has been striving for years to bring these shameful actions more
exposure, because we believe that by informing folks of the atrociousness of our
current situation, we the people can overcome the perfidy we find ourselves
enmeshed in.

We have published Nick Bryant’s Franklin Scandal: A Story of Power-brokers,
Child Abuse & Betrayal, Henry Vinson’s Confessions of a DC Madam The Politics of
Sex, Lies, and Blackmail, Dr. Lori Handrahan’s Epidemic America’s Trade in Child
Rape, and others. We tried to get these books mainstream press coverage, hired PR
folks, sent out numerous press releases — to no avail. Even the fringe outlets
wouldn't cover, we were told directly that Coast-to-Coast AM wouldn't cover
these subjects, and were never able to get these authors on. Jesse Ventura
informed us that he was instructed that his show Conspiracy Theory with Jesse
Ventura could not cover pedophilia scandals. Why? And by keeping honest
information away from folk, it has allowed for the spurious politicization of very
real events into crazy conspiracy theories and meme warfare that devalues,
deflects and derides the actuality of the abuse.

Our forefathers and subsequent generations have given much so that we can
live in this grand experiment of people running their own affairs, not ruled by
Royals or Popes, but by our own wit and gumption. We can survive this
corruption, and be better by it’s exposure.

Whitney Webb is one of the lonely voices of truth in the wilderness of today’s
media landscape. She has been delivering solid information through various
websites and podcasts. TrineDay is proud to publish her two volume exposition, A
Nation Under Blackmail, a deep, deep dive into corruption that effects all of our
lives and futures. Not salacious reportage but one that asks the basic questions:
who, what, where, how and why.

Looking at this history, Whitney sorts out the different players, agendas and
scandals giving us a honest view of our past — warts and all. And gives us a
surprising glimpse of forthcoming technological advances in blackmail
techniques. Thank-you, Whitney!

Whither goest our ship of state?

Onwards to the Utmost of Futures!
Peace,

R.A. “Kris” Millegan
Publisher

TrineDay

August 22, 2022

CONTENTS

Introduction

13) The World of Leslie Wexner
14) The Darkside of Wexner’s “Philanthropy?”

15) Ghislaine Maxwell: Heiress to an Espionage Empire

16) Crooked Campaigns

17) _Epstein’s Enterprise?

18) Predators

19) The Prince and the President

20) Epstein, Edge, and Big Tech

21) From PROMIS to Palantir: The Future of Blackmail
Documents

Index

INTRODUCTION, VOLUME 2

he July 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and his subsequent death that August

brought national as well as international attention to a sex ring where certain
members of the power elite sexually abused and exploited female minors and
young women. Epstein’s death, officially ruled a suicide, has been treated
skeptically by many, for a variety of reasons. Regardless of the real circumstances
of his death, it has led to scores of Americans embracing the view that his death
was both intentional and necessary to protect his powerful co-conspirators and
the full extent of his covert and illegal activities.

Even if one chooses not to entertain such disconcerting possibilities, it is quite
apparent that most of those who aided or enabled Epstein will never see the inside
of a prison cell. Though Ghislaine Maxwell is now serving a 20 year sentence,
others known to have been intimately involved in his illegal activities continue to
enjoy protection from the so-called “sweetheart deal”, or plea deal that followed
Epstein’s first run-in with the law for his sex trafficking activities in the mid-2000s.
In addition, Ghislaine Maxwell’s recent trial saw information involving third
parties redacted, leading many to believe that the public will never know the
names of the “johns” or clients, who benefitted from the sex trafficking activities of
Epstein and Maxwell and who were potentially blackmailed by them.

Yet, for both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, there is much more to the
story. This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as
Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump
transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweet-heart deal”
because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US
attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the
time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to
“intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence
asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm or deny the claim.

Other hints of a connection between Epstein and intelligence subsequently
emerged, with reporting from a variety of sources that Epstein was afhliated with

the CIA, Israeli intelligence, or both. Despite the implications and significance of
these connection(s) to intelligence, most of mainstream media declined to dig
deeper into these claims, instead largely focusing on the salacious aspects of the
Epstein case. The narrative soon became that Epstein was an anomaly, the sole
mastermind of an industrial sex trafficking enterprise and a talented con artist.
Even his closest associates and benefactors, like retail billionaire Leslie Wexner,
have been taken at their word that they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, even
when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.

Indeed, it was later stated by Cindy McCain, wife of former Senator John
McCain, that “we all knew what he [Epstein] was doing” at an event in January
2020, where she also claimed that authorities were “afraid” to properly apprehend
him. If he was such an anomaly and a stand-alone con artist —- how was he
singlehandedly able to intimidate the law enforcement apparatus of an entire
nation for decades? The claim that Epstein did not have powerful backers and
benefactors stands on incredibly shaky ground.

Oddly enough, mainstream reporting on Epstein was once relatively open
about his alleged intelligence ties, with British media reporting as early as 1992
and throughout the early 2000s that Epstein had ties to both US and Israeli
intelligence. In addition, also in the early 1990s, Epstein’s name was mysteriously
dropped from a major investigation into one of the largest Ponzi schemes in
history even though he was labeled the mastermind of that swindle in grand jury
testimony. Around the same time, subsequently released White House visitor logs
show that Epstein visited the Clinton White House 17 times, accompanied on
most of these visits by a different, attractive young woman. Reporting on those
visitor logs was largely done by a single media outlet, Britains The Daily Mail,
with hardly any American mainstream media outlets bothering to investigate
these revelations about Epstein and a former US president.

Why was Epstein so heavily protected from justice for decades - in
connection to both his sex trafficking crimes and his financial crimes? Why have
the once commonly reported intelligence connections of Jeffrey Epstein now been
relegated to “conspiracy theory” despite evidence to the contrary? If powerful
Senators knew what Epstein was doing to young women and girls — who else knew
and why wasn't something done?

This two-volume book endeavors to show why Jeffrey Epstein was able to
engage in a series of mind-boggling crimes for decades without incident. Far from
being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have

engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information
(ie. “intelligence) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their
activities and securing their compliance. Most of these individuals, including
Epstein himself, have their roots in the covert world where organized crime and
intelligence have intermingled and often cooperated for the better part of the last
90 years, if not longer. Perhaps most shockingly, these men are all interconnected
to various degrees and those connections, networks and associations were the
subject of Volume 1 of this book.

In Volume 2, we are introduced to Jeffrey Epstein. Detailed here are the key
players in his rise and early career, many of whom have not been properly
scrutinized by the media, and the existing evidence of Epstein’s connections to
intelligence agencies and the networks detailed at length in Volume 1. We then
turn to Epstein’s connections to retail mogul Leslie Wexner, with a focus on
Wexner’s own rise, his particular brand of philanthropy and the many roles that
Epstein went on to play in his business empire, including some with apparent links
to espionage activity. Also examined in detail is the history behind Ghislaine
Maxwell and her relationship with Epstein in the wake of her father’s death in
1991.

While the sex trafficking activities of Epstein and Maxwell are discussed at
length and examined in depth, this book gives particular attention to the
dramatically under-reported relationship that Jeffrey Epstein had with the Clinton
White House from 1993 through 1995 and the significance of his 17 known
White House meetings. Epstein brought many attractive, young women with him
to these meetings and many of his meetings were with a man named Mark
Middleton. Middleton, who died under suspicious circumstances in May 2022,
was embroiled in foreign espionage activities at the time he was meeting with
Epstein. Those activities were later investigated by Congress in relation to illegal
fundraising efforts for Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Epstein’s activities
at the Clinton White House, and in other parts of the country during this same
period in time, point toward a major scandal of the Clinton era that has yet to be
properly investigated.

Volume 2 of One Nation Under Blackmail concludes by examining the
relationship between Jeffrey Epstein/The Maxwells and Big Tech, particularly
Microsoft executives such as Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, among others. The
book closes out tracing how at least two of Ghislaine Maxwell's siblings appear to
have major intelligence connections as well as great influence in Big Tech while

also tracing their ties to the apparent successors to the stolen PROMIS software.
The theft of that software, as noted in Volume 1, had been intimately related to the
activities of Robert Maxwell.

In closing, it becomes evident that the nature of blackmail evolved with
society's increasing dependence on technology. Now, technologyderived
blackmail is harvested through systems of mass surveillance and sex blackmailers,
such as those discussed in Volume 1 as well as Jeffrey Epstein, became increasingly
irrelevant and expendable. It is perhaps for this reason, as noted in this book, that
Epstein and the Maxwells began efforts to influence and even blackmail top
figures in Silicon Valley soon after Epstein’s first arrest for sex trafficking in the
mid-2000s. Epstein also began making major investments in data harvesting firms
and those involved in mass surveillance.

The end result of is that the long-time reliance on the control of information,
including information used for blackmail, by the power structures discussed
throughout both volumes of this book has led them to create a society that gives
them access to more information than ever before. Enabled by remarkable
advances in technology, today the United States and much of the world have their
digital secrets in the hands of people who will do absolutely anything to maintain
their wealth, power and control. Essentially, the US - rather than one nation
under God - has become one nation under blackmail.

Whitney Webb, 8/23/22

Epstein’s Last Mug Shot

CHAPTER 11

THE RISE OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN

UNUSUAL BEGINNINGS

effrey Epstein was born on January 20, 1953 to Paula (nee Stolofsky) and

Seymour Epstein in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a homemaker while
his father was a groundskeeper for the New York Parks Department. His parents
valued education, hoping that sending their sons — Jeffrey and Mark - to the right

schools could be a “way out,’ or rather, a way up into a higher strata of New York
society.+

Epstein was raised in the Lafayette neighborhood around Coney Island and
attended Lafayette High School. In 1967, at age 14, he also attended the
Interlochen Center for the Arts. He reportedly received a scholarship to
Interlochen for his aptitude at playing the bassoon.” As an adult, Epstein would
later donate heavily to Interlochen, from 1990 to 2003, and used his connection to
the school to recruit unwitting female teens with musical talents into his sex
trafficking and sex blackmail enterprise. Epstein was even allowed to construct his
own lodge at Interlochen, the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge (now the Green
Lake Lodge), before the school cut ties with him after his first conviction in
2007.2 Given his own early attendance and his subsequent return for nefarious
purposes, some have suggested that Epstein himself may have been groomed at
Interlochen.*

In 1969, two years after he attended Interlochen, Epstein graduated from
Lafayette high school at age 16 after skipping two grades. Epstein then studied at
Cooper Union, from the fall of 1969 through the spring semester of 1971. He
attended New York University (NYU) from September 1971 to 1974, but never
graduated. Per a 2002 profile in New York Magazine, Epstein had studied at NYU’s
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

During this period, Epstein claims to have backpacked across Europe with
friends in 1971 and, while visiting London, met British cellist Jacqueline du Pré,

whose patron was Queen Elizabeth II. Epstein would later claim to have played
the piano for a du Pré performance during this visit and that, through her, he
gained access to the British royals, ultimately leading to his close relationship with
Prince Andrew, Duke of York. It’s unclear when du Pré would have made such an
introduction, but it would have had to have occurred before her 1987 death. What
does seem certain is that Epstein, during this trip, did befriend some British

aristocrats as, a few short years later, he was seen at the New York mansion of
British tycoon and corporate raider James Goldsmith.

It’s unclear how Epstein, while ostensibly backpacking, had come to make du
Pré’s acquaintance, though du Pré did have ties to the Israeli and New York Jewish
communities through her 1967 conversion to Judaism and subsequent marriage
that same year to Daniel Barenboim, as well as her friendships with musicians
Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman. It’s possible that
Epstein met du Pré through some mutual connection in these circles. Years later,
Epstein would claim to have once been a concert pianist, with media reports from
the early 1990s onwards referencing such claims.4 However, some who knew
Epstein early in life, including his brother Mark, give little weight to Epstein’s
claim to have been an accomplished pianist.

In the latter half of 1974, Epstein began working at the elite Dalton School,
teaching mathematics and physics. He would remain with the school until 1976.
There has been much disagreement in the mainstream press over who at Dalton
was responsible for hiring Jeffrey Epstein. At the time Epstein began working at
Dalton, the headmaster was Peter Branch. Branch, when contacted in 2019 by
professor and author Thomas Volscho, did not recall hiring Epstein and was
“relatively certain” that the previous headmaster, Donald Barr, or perhaps the head
of the Math Department, had hired Epstein because “hiring decisions were
typically made in the Spring.”

Branch also noted that Barr “liked to hire unconventional teachers to enhance
the educational experience for students at Dalton”? Epstein certainly fell in the
unconventional category, as he lacked the academic credentials to even teach at a
public school in New York City. Vanity Fair later reported that Barr had hired
other “gifted college dropouts,” which would make his hire of Epstein not as much
of an anomaly as some outlets have implied.12

Donald Barr was the son of an economist and psychologist who had joined
the OSS during World War II. He is alleged to have been a member of an OSS
“target team” in Germany and to have worked at a prisoner of war camp. His
son, William Barr, would subsequently follow his father into the world of
intelligence and served in the CIA from 1971 to 1977, which overlaps with the last
few years his father was headmaster at the Dalton School — including the year
Donald Barr is alleged to have hired Jeffrey Epstein. William Barr, whose alleged
role in Iran-Contra was mentioned in Chapter 8, would go on to serve as Attorney

General under George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, and served in that capacity
when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and found dead in a New York prison in 2019.

After exiting from US intelligence, Barr briefly worked as a literary editor and
then went into academia. He taught English at Columbia for ten years while
pursuing graduate studies. There, he started a series of conferences in 1955
focused on “the identification, guidance, and instruction of the gifted.” Barr joined
the School of Engineering the following year and these conferences then grew into
the Science Honors program, which offered Saturday classes to gifted high
schoolers. At the same time he was running this high school-focused program,
Barr was also directing the Talent Preservation Project, “a massive research and
therapy program for high school under-achievers.’ It is possible that there may
have been an early Epstein-Barr connection if Epstein had attended one of these
programs for gifted high school students.

Donald Barr would become headmaster of the Dalton School in 1964 and, a
decade later, in 1974, Donald Barr would leave the school under a cloud of
controversy, amid claims that he had meddled in the college admission prospects
of prominent students, including the son of writer Betty Friedan. The Dalton
parent who is credited with orchestrating Barr’s ouster was Richard Ravitch, a real
estate magnate who served in several government-appointed positions related to
housing during his career. Ravitch claimed that, by the end of his stint as
headmaster, Barr was reviled by many Dalton teachers as well as parents.8

Soon after leaving his post as headmaster, Donald Barr published Space
Relations, a bizarre science fiction novel that deals with power, drugs, and sex
slavery, which has fueled speculation about Barr's apparent decision to hire
someone like Epstein and what the fantasy book implies about Barr’s own
“extracurricular” interests.

During his time at Dalton, Jeffrey Epstein taught mostly seniors, ages 17 and
18. He also coached the math team, which competed locally and had a few notable
victories under Epstein’s leadership. The school’s newspaper, The Daltonian,
reported on March S, 1976 that Epstein wanted to start a “math-track team” due to
his “unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and
mathematical stimulation.” An earlier issue of the school paper refers to Epstein as
“the ivory show man on the piano,” again raising the running theme of Epstein’s
alleged musical talents.**

Several Dalton alumni later told various media outlets in 2019 how Epstein
attended student parties during his time as a Dalton teacher. One former student
who graduated from Dalton in 1976, Scott Spizer, told the New York Times that
Epstein was well known among students for the “persistent attention” he directed
at teenage girls in the hallways and recalled that Epstein had attended a party
where Dalton students were drinking. “I can remember thinking at the time “This
is wrong,” Spizer later stated. A 1978 graduate of Dalton, Paul Grossman, also
recalled Epstein attending student parties, stating that “it was weird” and that
“everyone talked about it? A woman who attended Dalton during this period, but
asked to remain anonymous, claimed that Epstein had “made multiple attempts to
spend time with her away from school” and she also specifically recalled
“reporting Epstein’s advances toward another female student to the school’s
headmaster?” +

The headmaster at that time, Peter Branch, did not mention such reports
when he was interviewed in 2019 regarding Epstein’s time at the school. This may
relate to the fact that several Dalton alumni who attended during this period
asserted that student-teacher relationships at the school “were not unheard of,”
suggesting that Epstein’s alleged behavior was part of a larger problem, as opposed
to an aberration.1® Branch has asserted that Epstein left the school following
concerns from his colleagues in the math and science departments that his
teaching skills had failed to improve over the previous year. “He was a young
teacher who didn’t come up to snuff. So, ultimately, he was asked to leave,’ Branch
was quoted as saying in late 2019.18

BEAR STEARNS AND THE BRONEMANS

A* Epstein left the Dalton School in 1976, he went to work on Wall Street
or Bear Stearns. There are two conflicting accounts of how he landed his first
job there — as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange.
Both accounts intimately involve Alan “Ace” Greenberg, then a partner at Bear
Stearns and who would become the bank’s CEO in roughly two years’ time, in
1978.

One account appears to have first been circulated in a 2002 profile on Epstein
published by New York Magazine. Per that account, while still at the Dalton
School, “So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to
Epstein point-blank: “What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be
working on Wall Street - why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call?”*?
However, a year later, in the 2003 Vanity Fair profile penned by Vicky Ward, it is
claimed that the connection with Greenberg was more direct, with Epstein
tutoring Greenberg’s son who attended Dalton and also being “friendly” with one
of his daughters.” Both claims have been repeated by numerous mainstream and
independent outlets over the years, though Greenberg's daughter, Lynne Koeppel
(nee Greenberg), has publicly backed the version of events as published in 2002
by New York Magazine.” Yet, other sources cite Koeppel as having recommended
Epstein to her father.” Regardless of which account is closer to reality, it is agreed
that Greenberg was ultimately the person who brought Epstein into Bear Stearns.

Once installed at the bank, Epstein’s ascent was rapid and he was mentored by
both Greenberg and James Cayne, who had also been hired by Greenberg years
prior. While he started off as a floor trader, he soon “began working with wealthy
clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric markets”? According to
a former senior Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business, “Epstein’s
accumulated knowledge of the U.S. tax codes — and how rich people can avoid
taxes through various investments — made him one of Bear's prized assets in its
small, but specialized brokerage department.’ “He never went to college, but he
knew everything about taxes. In fact, he could figure out just about anything if he
studied it. The guy was a genius,” the former executive was quoted as saying.”
Thanks to these talents, Epstein became a limited partner in relatively short order,

by 1980. While working at the bank, he met his former girlfriend Paula Heil
Fisher, now an opera producer.

Epstein abruptly left Bear Stearns in 1981. In the years before he became
notorious, he claimed to have left because he wished “to run his own business.”
However, within the company, claims abounded that Epstein had been involved in
a “technical infringement,’ with Epstein’s later associate, Steven Hoffenberg,
claiming that Epstein had left the bank after he was caught performing “illegal
operations.” The former Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business
claimed that Epstein had been asked to leave over “very serious stuff,” which he
insisted was related to “a significant expense account violation concerning an
airline ticket that upper management was misled about”? These claims were
denied by Cayne and Epstein, while Greenberg said he was unable to recall the
circumstances. In 2003, Cayne supported Epstein’s version of events, stating that
he had left the bank of “his own volition” because he wanted to strike out on his
own.

However, as noted by Vanity Fair, the SEC’s records of Epstein in 1981 tell a
different story. Per those records, Epstein was interviewed, along with other Bear
Stearns employees as part of an investigation into insider trading at the bank. The
insider trading case revolved around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981 for
St. Joe Minerals Corp by the Bronfman-owned company Seagram Company Ltd.
A handful of investors were ultimately found guilty of insider trading, including
Giuseppe Tome, former head of overseas operations of Bache & Company and
E.F. Hutton.

In Tome’s case, he was ordered to “disgorge,” or hand over, $3.5 million in
illegal profits related to the 1981 failed takeover attempt by Seagram in mid-1986.
However, Tome left the US shortly after the SEC began its investigation and did
not return to the country after the court's decision, complicating the enforcement
of the ruling against him.

The court claimed that Tome had “insinuated himself into the confidence of
Seagram Co. Chairman Edgar M. Bronfman.’ However, a spokesperson for
Bronfman declined to discuss his relationship with Tome and, in court testimony,
Bronfman had admitted to discussing “Seagram's secrets” with Tome because
Tome counted with “20 years in this business ... he ought to know the rules. I
assume he does know the rules.”

The Los Angeles Times described the Tome-Bronfman relationship in greater
detail:

According to testimony in the case, Tome and Bronfman met in July, 1980. Bronfman was
impressed with Tome’s financial acumen and within weeks had made him an unofficial adviser
to Seagram, a major producer and marketer of spirits and wine, on foreign currency matters.

The two men also struck up a close personal friendship, and Bronfman opened a
commodities account at Tome’s Geneva brokerage. The pair invested together in “Sophisticated
Ladies,’ the Broadway show, and at one point Bronfman even covered a bounced check that
Tome had issued to the show's producers. The families vacationed together in Switzerland and
the hunt country of Virginia.

Throughout this time, Bronfman was telling Tome of Seagram’s secret plans for major
corporate acquisitions. Pollack’s order indicated that Tome used inside information to trade in
stock and options of Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets. (Those trades were not
cited in the SEC lawsuit, however.) In some cases, testimony showed, Tome learned from
Bronfman of Seagram’s plans even before its board of directors.

On March 9, 1981, Bronfman declined a dinner invitation from Tome, saying he had to visit
Montreal for a board meeting. Tome concluded that a Seagram offer was imminent for St. Joe,
»26

which he knew as Bronfman’s next target.
There is also the fact that Bronfman had considerable connections to Tome’s
former employer Bache & Company, a company with ties to the OSS-organized
crime networks previously discussed in chapter 1. For instance, the Loeb banking
dynasty had intermarried into the family of Jules Bache of Bache & Company as
well as into the Bronfmans, with Edgar Bronfman’s wife Ann being the daughter of
John Loeb. Not only did the Bronfmans, Loebs, and Baches mingle through
marriage, but the multi-million dollar holdings of all three families combined “to
make up the largest single holding of stock in New York’s Empire Trust Company”
- Edgar Bronfman had joined that company’s board in 1963.4
Notably, the Empire Trust Company, with Bronfman still intimately involved,
announced a merger with the Bank of New York (BoNY) in 1968.28 Bronfman
was placed on the board of the Bank of New York after the merger and remained
there at least through 1975, if not later.22 As previously mentioned in chapter 9,
BoNY essentially merged with the banking network of Bruce Rappaport by the
1980s and, by 1992, executives at the bank were found to be closely associated
with Russian mobster and Robert Maxwell business associate Semion Mogilevich.
When the SEC investigation took place, Bronfman subsequently claimed to
have no knowledge of insider trading by Tome and claimed that Tome,
conveniently outside of the country and tried in absentia, lied to him about having
been involved in illegal trades related to the attempted takeover of St. Joe’s. As the

1986 court case against Tome makes clear, Bronfman’s ties to Tome were
considerable and he had a history of voluntarily supplying the man with Seagram's
“secret plans” before the company’s board even knew, as the Los Angeles Times had
noted. It appears, from Tome’s case, that Bronfman seemed to have thought
nothing of sharing “secret plans” with those outside the company and within his
inner circle. Also of note is that Tome, and presumably others, made insider trades
on Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets, and profited off those as
well. However, the trades involving those companies were, for reasons still unclear,
excluded from the SEC investigation.

Another figure sued in connection with insider trading as part of the failed
Seagram takeover attempt was Dennis B. Levine, “a prominent mergers specialist
with the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banking firm” who allegedly made

29 Drexel Burnham Lambert and

$12.6 million in illegal profits from the deal
many of its more infamous employees are mentioned throughout this book, as —
at this time — Drexel was “corralling the majority of American [corporate]
raiders”%

Dennis Levine was directly involved with many of these “raiders”, specifically
Ron Perelman, who dined with Epstein at Epstein’s home throughout the 2000s
and whose political fundraiser for Bill Clinton's re-election campaign was attended
by Epstein in the mid-90s (see Chapter 16). Levine worked regularly with
Perelman, serving as the “lead banker” for Perelman’s 1985 takeover of Revlon,
which Levine called “the high point” of his career.*4

In addition, Levine also played a key role in the hostile takeover of Crown
Zellerbach by Sir James Goldsmith, a member of the Clermont Club mentioned
in Chapter 4. Levine was intimately involved in Goldsmith's 1984-1985 takeover
of Crown Zellerbach. That takeover was actually the brainchild of Rothschild Inc.
and its then-President Robert S. Pirie** Goldsmith was a longtime business
associate of the Rothschilds and a distant cousin of the family.*4

As will be mentioned again in chapter 15, Pirie and Rothschild Inc. were later
the architects of Robert Maxwell's takeover of Macmillan in 1989. By 1989,
Maxwell and Goldsmith were closely associated, and Goldsmith would also later
have his own ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Goldsmith apparently knew Epstein long
before Epstein had started at Bear Stearns. According to a former friend of
Epstein’s, art collector Stuart Pivar, he had first met Epstein at “Jimmy Goldsmith's
mansion” in the early 1970s. “There,” Pivar later told Mother Jones, “there was

somebody playing the piano with great virtuosity. And it was Jeffrey Epstein.”*°
Epstein’s ties to Goldsmith may have come through his daughter, Isabel
Goldsmith, who has numerous telephone numbers and two addresses in Epstein’s
“little black book” of contacts.*2

In the context of this 1981 takeover attempt by Seagram, it is worth noting
that Pirie’s soon-to-be “second in command,’ Gerald Goldsmith, was previously
the executive vice president of E.F. Hutton, where Giuseppe Tome had also served
in a top executive position. Goldsmith left to join the Rothschild bank in 1982.38
(There is no familial relationship between Gerald Goldsmith and James
Goldsmith).

These networks that surrounded this SEC investigation would, after the fact,
clearly intersect with Epstein’s own network within a few years’ time. This raises
the possibility that this 1981 insider trading affair may have marked Epstein’s
entry into these circles or may indicate that he had already developed connections
there, as he was alleged to have been directly involved in such trades.

On March 12, 1981, a day after Seagram made the tender offer at the heart of
this insider trading case, Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns. At some point in
their investigation, the SEC was tipped off that Epstein knew something about
relevant insider trades that had been made at Bear Stearns, and the SEC
interviewed him on April 1*.

During that testimony, per SEC records, Epstein complained about how he
had been disciplined for a possible “Reg D” violation where he was said to have
lent money to a friend, who he later identified as Warren Eisenstein. Epstein had
been questioned about the loan, per his recollection, on March 4th and, five days
later, had been fined $2,500 by the bank. However, the SEC was mainly interested
in the timing of Epstein’s exit from Bear Stearns and the Bronfman/Seagram-
related insider trading. Epstein denied any connection and was never charged, but
Vanity Fair noted that the SEC interviewers were skeptical of Epstein’s denials.
Vanity Fair also noted that “if [Epstein] was such a big producer at Bear Stearns,
[why would he] have given it up over a mere $2,500 fine.’

It seems evident that the timing of Epstein’s “abrupt” departure and the
Bronfman-related insider trades go a bit beyond mere coincidence. It certainly
does seem unlikely that Epstein would abandon Bear Stearns over a relatively
small fine (by the bank’s standards), unless he had received another offer of

employment or if there was a risk that he would soon face greater, more costly
problems at Bear Stearns.

Furthermore, given that Edgar Bronfman had been somewhat open about the
plan for a Seagram takeover of St. Joe Mineral Corp, it is not outside the realm of
possibility that those “rumors” would have made their way to Epstein. Epstein had
become installed at Bear Stearns, and likely risen in its ranks so quickly, due to the
patronage of Alan Greenberg, who was intimately involved in several of the same
organizations as the Bronfmans, like the United Jewish Appeal and the Jerusalem
Foundation (the latter was notably created by Teddy Kollek, see chapter 3). Like
Greenberg, the Bronfmans also donated heavily to those same groups in addition
to being closely involved in their affairs. Greenberg also, at some point, saw his
philanthropic efforts intersect closely with those of Charles Bronfman, per the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.*2

Had Greenberg potentially been informed by a loose-lipped Edgar Bronfman,
just as Giuseppe Tome had been, and passed this along to one of his “protégés” at
Bear Stearns, Jeffrey Epstein? Or had Epstein, a protégé of Greenberg's, been
advising Bronfman on behalf of the bank? After all, Epstein was said to have
worked “with wealthy clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric
markets,” and Bronfman could have been such a client.42

If so, it may have prompted Epstein’s “abrupt” resignation, not so much to
protect a young Epstein, but potentially to protect Greenberg, who had — by then
— risen to become Bear Stearns’s CEO. Greenberg being ensnared in the SEC's
investigation would have been a much bigger headache for the bank than Epstein
— now, a former limited partner in the bank.

In addition, given the networks of both Giuseppe Tome and Danny Levine at
this time, and how Epstein would become a fixture in those networks in short
order, it may be possible that Epstein’s abrupt resignation was part of an effort not
just to shield Greenberg, but the full extent of these particular networks in this
1981 insider trading scheme, which was considerably larger than the select
components that the SEC had chosen to investigate.

If Epstein was advised to leave due to potential legal concerns, it is worth
mentioning that, as noted in Chapter 6, Bear Stearns was represented by the law
firm Rogers & Wells and, from 1976 to 1981, was specifically a client of William
Casey. Though Casey likely wasn’t involved in this particular situation, given that
he had become CIA director several weeks before the tender offer, it is worth

reminding the reader that Casey's influence is another potential factor to consider
when examining this situation as well as Epstein’s activities immediately after
leaving the bank.

THE FINANCIAL MERCENARY AND
INTELLIGENCE ASSET

A* leaving Bear Stearns, Epstein would later claim that he went on to
anage “money only for billionaires,” telling Vicky Ward in 2003 that “I was
the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make
my limit a billion dollars or more.”“4 However, it appears that there was much
more to the story, as the details of Epstein’s life, from his 1981 exit from Bear
Stearns until around 1986, are murky at best. The details that are known about
Epstein during this period point to something considerably different than
Epstein’s own account of his activities at this time. This is particularly obvious
when one considers that his formal role as a money manager did not appear to
begin until 1988, when he founded J. Epstein & Co.”

Throughout the 1980s, Epstein’s main company was called Intercontinental
Assets Group, which was incorporated in 1981.48 Apart from that, little about the
company is known. However, there is little indication he used the company to
manage billionaire wealth, as the existing evidence about his life during this
decade points in another direction.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, a former friend of Epstein’s, Jesse Kornbluth,
stated that Epstein had claimed to be a “bounty hunter” for the rich and powerful:

When we met in 1986, Epstein’s double identity intrigued me — he said he didn’t just manage
money for clients with mega-fortunes, he was also a high-level bounty hunter. Sometimes, he
told me, he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times

those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.“4

Actress Anna Obregón later stated that she had hired Epstein, who mentioned
his company Intercontinental Assets Group, to help her father, Madrid-based real
estate magnate Antonio Garcia Férnandez. Garcia Férnandez had been one of
several powerful Spanish individuals, which included members of the Spanish
royal family, who had invested in Drysdale Government Securities, which
collapsed due to fraud in 1982. Epstein had been hired by Obregón to “recover”
money from the Drysdale collapse on behalf of her father, according to James
Patterson’s book Filthy Rich.*®

Similar claims also surfaced in Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of Epstein in Vanity
Fair. Ward wrote that: “A few of the handful of current friends who have known
him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a ‘bounty hunter,
recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has
a license to carry a firearm.”4°

Reference to firearms during this period can be found in even earlier reports
of Epstein, such as a 2001 report in the UK’s Evening Standard that was written by

Nigel Rosser. There, Rosser asserts the following about Epstein:

He has a licence to carry a concealed weapon, once claimed to have worked for the CIA
although he now denies it - and owns properties all over America. Once he arrived at the
London home of a British arms dealer bringing a gift - a New York police-issue pump-action

riot gun. “God knows how he got it into the country,” a friend said 42

The identity of this British arms dealer may be Sir Douglas Leese. Per Steven
Hoffenberg, an alleged “mentor” to Epstein who worked closely with him
beginning in 1987, he had been introduced to Epstein by Leese and further
claimed that, soon after Epstein left Bear Stearns, he began working closely with
the “mysterious” British arms dealer.4® Hoffenberg’s own relationship with
Epstein is dealt with later in this chapter.

Per Hoffenberg, in an interview with journalist Edward Szall, Epstein was
hired by Leese to serve as an investment banker for Leese-owned and Leese-
managed companies. Douglas Leese’s son, Julian Leese has stated that Epstein
first interacted with the Leese family around 1981, after meeting another of
Douglas Leese’s sons, Nick, at a party hosted by “a well-known oil baron down in
Texas“? Julian Leese has acknowledged that his father was a “mentor” to Epstein
and has spoken at length about Epstein seeming bright and intelligent as well as
deeply entwined with business and social networks in the UK during this period.

Hoffenberg has also asserted that Epstein, in the early 1980s, “was trained in
arms trafficking and money laundering by Adnan Khashoggi and Sir Douglas
Leese jointly.... Jeffrey Epstein was a major participant and principal in the arms
trafficking and money laundering operations of Adnan Khashoggi and Sir Douglas
Leese, for Israel, for what they were doing in the United Kingdom.”>+

Much of Leese’s own history is shadowy. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he
worked at Cam Gears Limited, an automobile parts manufacturing company, and
became its managing director in 1957.22 Cam Gears was acquired by TRW Inc. in
1965, which had previously been known as Thompson Ramo-Woolbridge. It was

the result of a merger between Thompson Products, a major supplier of aircraft
parts for the US Air Force, and Ramo-Woolbridge, a military contractor for ICBM
components and components for other weapons systems.

Though it’s not exactly clear, TRW seems to have been Leese’s introduction
into the world of weapons dealing. Oddly enough, years later, a young Bill Gates,
who would eventually develop his own ties to Epstein (see Chapter 20), would
also get “his first big break” thanks to TRW, when he worked “debugging grid
control software for” the company at age 15.2

Anecdotal evidence may also indicate the Leese family’s persistent ties to
TRW. After it was acquired by TRW, Cam Gears would have fallen under TRW’s
automobile-focused subsidiary, TRW Automotive, which was headquartered in
Livonia, Michigan. In 2017, the International Police and Fire Chaplains
Association (IPFCA) of Taylor, Michigan, received a $50,000 donation from
Gratitude America Limited, a foundation connected to Jeffrey Epstein. The
donation was brokered by Douglas Leese’s son Julian Leese, who was friends with
IPFCA director Daniel Tackett.* Taylor and Livonia are just 13 miles apart and
the aforementioned donation seems to indicate long-standing family ties of the
Leese’s to the local area, as well as Epstein’s enduring ties to the Leese family.

Julian Leese has denied his father was an “arms dealer,” claiming he worked in
“defense” but was mainly involved in manufacture and sale of defense products
other than weapons, such as radar systems.* However, Julian Leese has conceded
that his father was a friend of notorious arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, whose
freindshipn with Douglas Leese most likely revolved around something other
than radar and navigation systems.

Between 1966 and 1967, soon after Cam Gears was acquired by TRW, Leese
began living in South Wraxall Manor, a luxurious home in Wiltshire, England. The
house had been sold by its previous owners, the aristocratic Long family, in 1966,
and at least one account from 1967 states that Leese was living in the home at that
time, suggesting that he had been the mysterious “businessman” who had
purchased the home.*° An acquaintance of Leese’s later stated that Leese “gave
very unusual parties” at South Wraxall Manor as early as the 1970s, but didn’t
elaborate as to why they were “very unusual” $Z

In 1978, House of Wraxall Limited was established with Douglas Leese and
his wife, Jane Primrose Leese, listed as company directors. Douglas Leese listed
his address as being located in Hong Kong, while that of his wife was listed as

South Wraxall Manor. The company was officially involved in the development
and sale of real estate projects.°8

Not long after the creation of this company, Leese found himself involved
with the Wraxall Group. It is unclear, given the name of Leese’s residence at the
time, if he was the founder/owner of the Wraxall Group. However, he was
certainly in charge of the Group’s Bermuda subsidiaries, including the Bermuda-
based, wholly-owned subsidiary of the Wraxall Group, the Lorad Company.>”
Before going into greater detail about Lorad, and how Lorad may have been
central to not only Leese’s but Epstein’s activities in the early 1980s, it is worth
detailing a few of the other characters involved with the Wraxall Group.

Other individuals tied to the Wraxall Group aside from Leese include Sir
Maurice (Robert) Johnston, who had previously served in the British military,
attaining the rank of Lieutenant General and serving in Germany, Egypt, Jordan,
Libya, Northern Ireland, and Borneo. He was Deputy Chief of Defense Staff in
1982 and 1983 before retiring from the military. A year later, in 1984, Johnston
became “managing director, Freshglen Ltd, Wraxall Group”®2

Another interesting individual was “executive vice president of the Wraxall
Group” from 1986 to 1990 — Peter Maxwell Dickson.“ Dickson, who has a
lengthy history of engaging in fraud and suspect banking practices, ran the
Bermuda-based firm Grosvenor Group Holdings, a decades-old offshore complex
that has stashed away over $1 billion for the Dukes of Westminster over the
years. Grosvenor Group Holdings also controlled a Dickson-owned bank called
Horizon Bank International that was set up in 1995 by William Cooper, who then
served as the bank’s managing director.

From 1981 to 1984, Cooper was the general manager of Swiss American
Banking Group, which had been organized by Bruce Rappaport and Marvin
Warner with the assistance of Burton Kanter.®? Rappaport, discussed at length
throughout this book (mainly in chapter 3), was intimately involved with the Iran-
Contra affair and BCCI, as well as intelligence/organized crime networks in Israel
and Russia. He was also a close friend of William Casey. Kanter was the mob-
linked attorney that had previously partnered with CIA banker Paul Helliwell who
was first introduced in chapter 1.

While Dickson has his own ties to the shadow banking empires previously
detailed in this book, it is uncertain when he made those connections. It’s quite
likely that he came into contact with those forces during or after his time with the

Wraxall Group. This is because, Sir Douglas Leese, who managed Wraxall’s
businesses in Bermuda, where Dickson also resided, seems to have been very
much connected to these same networks, including via his reported involvement
in arms deals that paralleled Iran-Contra itself back in the early 1980s. These deals
are also alleged to have involved not only Saudi arms dealer and Iran-Contra figure
Adnan Khashoggi, but also Jeffrey Epstein.

The Lorad Company was one of the main Wraxall subsidiaries in Bermuda
that was firmly under Leese’s control. In June 1983, a joint venture of Lorad and
another company was formed called Norinco Lorad Limited and, six months later,
Lorad (Far East) Limited was created in Hong Kong, where Leese had already had
at least one address listed as early as 1978.% The Norinco referenced here is the
Chinese state-owned weapons producer Norinco (North Industries Corporation),
which was founded in 1980 with the approval of the State Council of China.

After its founding, Norinco, along with a handful of other Chinese state-
owned firms, helped China to emerge “as a leading arms supplier to the Third
World, signing agreements between 1983 and 1990 worth more than $16 billion”
($33.7 billion in 2022 dollars). During this period, “much of China’s business was
with Iran; Beijing became Tehran's biggest weapons supplier during the 1981-88
Iran-Iraq War, selling $4.8 billion [$10.1 billion in 2022 dollars] in weapons and
munitions to Iran in 1983-90,” according to then-senior staff member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee William Triplett II, writing for the
Washington Post in 1991.22

These sales to Iran during this period were dominated by Norinco as well as
Poly Technologies, owned by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and China
Jingan, controlled by the People’s Armed Police. Thus, the very year these Chinese
weapons companies began selling massive amounts of weapon to Iran, 1983, was
also the same year the main company involved in its sales, Norinco, set up a joint
venture with the Leese-managed Lorad Company in Bermuda.

According to Steven Hoffenberg, by 1983, Leese was working closely with
Jeffrey Epstein, specifically on the sale of Chinese weapons to Iran. Per
Hoffenberg, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, by then on the payroll of Israel's
Mossad and close to the intelligence apparati of the Saudis and the United States,
was also part of these efforts and had a “revenue sharing agreement” with Leese on
arms deals.®4 Hoffenberg also asserts that Leese was deeply enmeshed in British
intelligence networks and was actively involved with those networks at the time. If

we are to believe Hoffenberg, then Khashoggi, Leese, and Epstein were working
together on a parallel operation to Iran-Contra while Iran-Contra was on-going.

In addition, Leese and Khashoggi were both involved in the 1985 arms deal
with Saudi Arabia, known as the Al-Yamamah Deal, albeit on different sides.
Khashoggi represented the French weapons industry, while Leese, along with
Khashoggi rival Wafic Said, represented British defense interests, which ultimately
won the day. Khashoggi later claimed that the deal had been secured for Britain, in
part, due to the involvement of Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son whose
peripheral role in Iran Contra is discussed in Chapter 7.68 Margaret Thatcher was
Prime Minister at the time the Al-Yamamah Deal was signed, whereby Saudi
Arabia paid for weapons largely manufactured by BAE Systems in oil, and
accusations later arose that Britain only won the deal due to having bribed Saudi
leadership. Corruption investigations into Al Yamamah were later shut down
thanks in large part to the efforts of Tony Blair as well as Prince Andrew, with the
latter being a well-known Epstein confidant.“

Aside from the documented Norinco-Leese and _ Leese-Khashoggi
connections, there is further evidence that supports Hoffenberg’s claims. For
instance, during this period, Adnan Khashoggi was a reported client of Epstein,
per Vicky Ward as cited by New York Magazine, during the period after he left Bear
Stearns and before he formally teamed up with Hoffenberg and Leslie Wexner,
which includes this period of time (i.e. 1983). Epstein is also known to have
been associated with Leese during this period, and Leese subsequently appears in
Epstein’s black book of contacts. In addition, Epstein later maintained a
relationship with at least one of Leese’s sons, Julian. Douglas Leese’s other son,
Nicholas, who allegedly introduced Epstein to the Leese family, was arrested in
1996 and charged with over 200 counts related to corruption in Singapore.

Furthermore, during this period of time, Epstein was clearly involved in the
world of shadowy banking practices and fronts. Per his claims to several friends
and as mentioned in more than a few press reports authored prior to his 2007
arrest, Epstein was working as a financial “bounty hunter” and helped both
recover and hide stolen money on behalf of powerful people. Thus, to be
successful in such work, he would have needed an intimate working knowledge of
front companies, offshore banking, and other components of the financial webs
woven by those looking to hide away “looted” money.

If Adnan Khashoggi was indeed Epstein’s client, this suggests that Epstein may
have been associated with BCCI in some capacity. If Epstein worked in this
financial “bounty hunter” capacity for Khashoggi, it’s very likely that he would
have come into contact with BCCI during this period, as BCCI was the main bank
Khashoggi used during the period in which they were alleged to have worked
together. In addition, the weapons sales to Iran that involved Norinco during this
period, in which Leese, Epstein, and Khashoggi are alleged to have been involved,
also made heavy use of BCCI. As noted by the Washington Post in 1991:

According to a Hong Kong source with detailed knowledge of China’s weapons sales policies,
until recently, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was the bank of choice
for the arms exporters. With its extensive Mideast operations and reputed money-laundering
proclivities, BCCI would have been a natural fit for the Chinese. BCCI also operated in Beijing,
the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone outside Hong Kong and in 27 branches in Hong Kong

itself through what BCCI called the Bank of Credit and Commerce Hong Kong (BCCHK).2

Years later, when BCCI was collapsing, the Lippo Group of the Riady family,
who boasted close ties to Bill Clinton and Clinton/Bush financier Jackson
Stephens, would attempt to intervene to rescue BCCHK. It is worth noting the
involvement of Riady/Stephens with the BCCI subsidiary that was used by
Norinco and other state-owned firms during this period. This is because, as will be
detailed extensively in Chapters 16 and 17, Epstein may have been involved in
arms smuggling activities related to a network that spanned the Clinton White
House, Norinco and the Poly Group, and the Riadys in the mid-1990s. The fact
that Epstein would find himself enmeshed within these same networks in the mid-
1990s further corroborates his involvement with those same entities back in 1983,
as has been alleged by Hoffenberg and other sources.

Hoffenberg, who was found dead in his apartment in late August 2022, had
notably confided in Edward Szall off the record that Epstein had had a relationship
with BCCI, but did not provide any specifics.

BCCI’s_ considerable intelligence ties and the reported intelligence
connections of Khashoggi and Leese also make it worth considering Epstein’s past
claims, as cited by Nigel Rosser, that he once worked for the CIA. BCCI’s
connections to the CIA and other allied intelligence agencies were discussed in
Chapter 7. In addition, at the time this operation involving Khashoggi, Leese, and
Epstein was said to have occurred — around 1983 — Khashoggi also employed two
other men deeply enmeshed in these networks where Big Business, intelligence,

and organized crime intermingle: Roy Cohn and Robert Keith Gray.4 Notably,
Gray was also very much involved with BCCI, as noted in Chapter 7, and both
Cohn and Gray were involved in sexual blackmail operations to some extent.

In addition, in 1989, Khashoggi himself had been called by Vanity Fair “one of
the greatest whoremongers in the world.” His biographer, Ronald Kessler,
remarked in 1988 that “His [Khashoggi’s] whole modus operandi was to influence
clients with his opulent lifestyle” and that “he would give them [potential clients]
anything they wanted: girls, food, cash... He had quite a variety of occasions on
the boat. Some were very formal, some were orgies.”

According to the UK’s Independent, “One of the ‘girls’ used in this way,
Pamella Bordes, later spoke of being ‘part of an enormous group ... used as sexual
bait,” suggesting that Khashoggi commanded a veritable harem of women who
were used to entice, or potentially coerce, would-be clients. However, these lists
of “potential clients” also included notable politicians, diplomats, celebrities, and a
cadre of businessman. In the case of politicians and diplomats, it’s entirely possible
that Khashoggi’s yacht was used as a means of collecting blackmail that Khashoggi
used to benefit his network, or anyone willing to pay the right price. This was
also alleged by the head of a highly-connected call-girl ring, Fortuna Israel a.k.a.
“Madame Tuna,’ as discussed in Chapter 7.

Notably, Khashoggi’s infamous yacht would be sold to Roy Cohn’s protégé,
Donald Trump, in 1988, with the involvement of the Sultan of Brunei.Z2 As will be
mentioned in the next chapter, the Sultan of Brunei would become Epstein’s
landlord in the office he shared with Evangeline Gouletas-Carey and, as we will
see in Chapter 19, the Sultan of Brunei makes other curious appearances in the
Epstein-Clinton relationship.

In addition, both Cohn and Gray were very close to then-CIA Director Bill
Casey. In Gray’s case, as noted in the previous chapter, Newsweek described him as
often having “boasted of his close relationship with the CIA's William Casey; Gray
used to say that before taking on a foreign client, he would clear it with Casey? 2
In Cohn’s case, Christine Seymour, Cohn’s long-time switchboard operator, said
Casey and Cohn were close friends and, during the 1980 Reagan campaign, Casey
“called Roy almost daily”®2 As noted in the last chapter, in the immediate
aftermath of Reagan’s electoral victory, both Cohn and Gray took Khashoggi on as
a client. Jeffrey Epstein would follow suit, shortly after his resignation from Bear
Stearns. As previously mentioned, Casey had been the legal representative of Bear

Stearns during Epstein’s time there up until several weeks before Epstein’s abrupt
resignation, when Casey became CIA director.

With Cohn, Gray, and Casey in the periphery, this also raises the additional
possibility that Epstein may have first been exposed to the idea of sexual blackmail
operations in this period, due to his proximity to people like Cohn and Gray
through Khashoggi, as well as (and more likely) his proximity to Khashoggi
himself. Another possibility is that Epstein was first exposed to this type of
operation through a potential link to BCCI, as the “dirtiest bank of them all” was
also alleged to have been involved in the sex trafficking of minors.

According to the report entitled The BCCI Affair, by then-US Senators John
Kerry (D-MA) and Hank Brown (R-CO), BCCI officials were alleged to have
obtained leverage over and curried favor with powerful individuals, including
prominent members of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), by
providing them with young virgins, many of whom were under the age of 18.

The report (pages 69-70) specifically states:

BCCI’ involvement in prostitution arose out of its creation of its special protocols department
in Pakistan to service the personal requirements of the Al-Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi, and on
an as-needed basis, other BCCI VIPs, including the families of other Middle Eastern rulers.

Several BCCI officers described the protocol department’s handling of prostitution to
Senate investigators in private, and two — Abdur Sakhia and Nazir Chinoy — confirmed their
general knowledge of the practice in testimony.

The prostitution handled by BCCI was carried over from practices originally instituted by
[BCCI founder Agha Hasan] Abedi at the United Bank, when working with a woman, Begum
Asghair Rahim, he cemented his relationship with the Al-Nahyan family through providing
them with Pakistani prostitutes.

Among BCCI bank officials in Pakistan, Begum Rahim was reputed to have in United Bank
first won the favors or attention of the royal family by arranging to get virgin women from the
villages from the ages of 16 to 20. Rahim would make payments to their families, take the
teenaged girls into the cities, and there taught them how to dress and how to act, including the
correct mannerisms. The women would be then brought to the Abu Dhabi princes. For years,
Rahim would take 50-60 of these girls at a time to large department stores in Lahore and
Karachi to get them outfitted for clothes. Given the size of Rahim’s revenue and her spending
habits — $100,000 at a time was not unusual when she was engaged in outfitting her charges —
her activities became notorious in the Pakistani community generally, and there was substantial
competition among clothiers and jewelers for her business.

According to one U.S. investigator with substantial knowledge of BCCI’s activities, some
BCCI officials have acknowledged that some of the females provided some members of the Al-
Nahyan family [one of the ruling families in the UAE] were young girls who had not yet reached
puberty, and in certain cases, were physically injured by the experience. The official said that

former BCCI officials had told him that BCCI also provided males to homosexual Vips 81

This BCCI-run sex trafficking operation has some obvious similarities to the
operation that would later be run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, with
Maxwell's actions in that operation paralleling the actions of Begum Asghair
Rahim to a considerable degree (see Chapter 18).

Returning to the matter of Epstein’s past claim to have been tied to the CIA
during this period, there is also evidence of Norinco specifically working with
CIA assets to arm the ClIA-backed Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Michael
Riconosciuto, who was then directly affiliated with the CIA and who programmed
a backdoor into PROMIS (see Chapter 9), also claimed to have personally
assisted the CIA effort to arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with unassembled
Chinese rocket systems in 1986. Riconosciuto alleges that he aided this specific
effort using pre-existing connections of his to Norinco.

In an interview with author Cheri Seymour, Riconosciuto stated that the
furnishing of weapons to Iran, the Afghanistan Mujahideen, and the Contras were
done by the a single entity, which he referred to as simply “The Company.’
Riconosciuto also said that Mujahideen and Contras would “pay” for the arms
with drugs, not currency, as part of the parallel “arms-for-drugs” trafficking
operations that was detailed in Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, among other sources.
The FBI would later refer to “The Company” in a case file on Andrew C. Thornton
II, calling it a CIA-linked network of former special forces officers and law
enforcement officials involved in the smuggling of cocaine into the US.8

Another associate of Riconosciuto during this period, namely W. Patrick
Moriarty, was also deeply involved in managing negotiations and trade
agreements with China during this period, supporting Riconosciuto’s claim that
he and his networks during this period were connected to influential Chinese
firms, such as Norinco. The Norinco connection to BCCHK, as well as the alleged
connections to Epstein and then-CIA-connected Riconosciuto, makes the case
that Norinco was involved with the CIA-afhliated individuals and entities during
this period as it related to arms deals.

Furthermore, given that Khashoggi was affiliated with Saudi, American,
British, and Israeli intelligence by 1982, it is also possible that Epstein made his
way into the fold of intelligence himself through Khashoggi.

Epstein’s affiliation with some national intelligence agency was essentially
confirmed in 2019, when it was reported that then-Secretary of Labor Alex
Acosta, who had signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” during his first criminal

case, had “been told” to back off of Epstein, that Epstein was above his pay grade.
“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” Acosta had
reportedly told the Trump transition team.* It is unclear, from Acosta’s reported
statements, exactly what intelligence agency, American or foreign, Epstein had
been afhliated with and when.

It is entirely possible that, as Epstein once claimed, he worked for the CIA
during this specific period, and later affiliated himself with another intelligence
agency. Alternatively, he may have worked for more than one intelligence agency
at a time, being a double or potentially even triple agent.

According to former Israeli military intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who
I first interviewed in December 2019, Epstein’s affiliation with Israeli intelligence
dated back at least to the mid-1980s, when Ben-Menashe was personally
introduced to Epstein by Robert Maxwell. Per Ben-Menashe, Maxwell introduced
Epstein as having been approved by the “higher ups” in the Israeli intelligence
network where Ben-Menashe and Maxwell were both operating. The introduction
reportedly occurred at Maxwell’s offices in London.

During this period, Ben-Menashe has stated that he believes one of these
“higher ups” was Ehud Barak, the future Prime Minister of Israel who was head of
the Israeli military intelligence directorate AMAN from 1983 to 1985. Ben-
Menashe could not recall the exact date of his introduction to Epstein, but stated
that it occurred within that 1983-1985 period in which Barak held this post. Barak
would later become infamous for his close proximity, not only to Epstein, but his
sex trafficking/sex blackmail operation, which is discussed in the next chapter.

In a September 2019 interview with journalist and former CBS News producer
Zev Shalev, he stated “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of
our group.... I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick
Davies [Foreign Editor of the Maxwell-Owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it
was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.”8°

Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies,
and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment
and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this time
period. Ben-Menashe was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for
anyone else he knew at the time, but did confirm that Maxwell wanted to involve
Epstein in the arms transfer in which he, Davies, and Ben-Menashe were engaged
on Israel's behalf.

After the initial introduction, Ben-Menashe would witness Epstein at
Maxwells offices on several occasions, stating that Epstein was “frequently
present” at that location. Ben-Menashe stated specifically that Epstein “used to be
in [Robert Maxwell’s] office [in London] quite often” and would arrive there
between trips to and from Israel.24 Ben-Menashe also asserted that Ghislaine
Maxwell accompanied her father so frequently that she was involved in his
intelligence-related activities to some extent. However, he stopped short of saying
how involved she was or what she had specifically been involved in prior to her
father’s death. Ghislaine’s early life and her relationship with her father is detailed
in Chapter 15.

Aside from Ben-Menashe'’s claims, there are also statements made by Steven
Hoffenberg that, during the late 1980s, Epstein had boasted of his ties to Israel's
intelligence services, claiming that it had been Ghislaine Maxwell who had made
the introduction.88 Furthemore, Zev Shalev reported that another well-placed and
independent source, who has remained anonymous, had corroborated Ben-
Menashe’s assertions that Epstein had been an intelligence asset for Israel.&2

Close ties to Israel’s government later in his life can also be seen in an odd visit
Epstein made to Israel in 2008. The visit was odd partly due to the timing, as it
took place during the course of his trial and just a few months before he was
sentenced to prison in June 2008. In April of that year, the Palm Beach Daily News
reported that Epstein was staying at the Tel Aviv Hilton and quoted an Epstein
spokesman as saying that he was “spending Passover, meeting with Israeli research
scientists, and taking a tour of military bases”? Access to military bases is
certainly not something easily obtained by tourists to Israel, even very wealthy
ones, again suggesting that Epstein had long-standing connections to Israel's
national security apparatus, along with his “friendship” to Ehud Barak.

Some have speculated that the timing of this trip saw Epstein implore
prominent Israelis for aid in his legal troubles back in the US. After all, as will be
revisited again in chapter 14, Ehud Barak was a key reason behind Bill Clinton's
controversial pardon of Marc Rich and Epstein may have thought a similar
intervention could work to his benefit.

It is worth noting that, during and before this period of Epstein’s career (i.e.
the early to mid-1980s), both Israeli and British intelligence were already involved
in the acquisition of sexual blackmail domestically within the United States. Some

of the blackmail sources were call services operating in New York and
Washington, DC that sexually exploited minors.

In 1982, the New York State Select Committee on Crime, which investigated
nationwide networks of underage sex trafficking and the production of child
pornography, saw committee investigator Dale Smith reveal that an accountant for
“several call service operations” in Washington, DC, named Robert Koehler was
selling “information on the sexual proclivities of the clients to agents of foreign
intelligence services% Two other call service operations were called Brian’s Boys
and Fantasies Unlimited, which were operated out of Alexandria, Virginia, and
managed by Jonathan C. Reynolds III. Reynolds told Smith that he was “selling
information out of the call services” specifically “to British and Israeli
intelligence”? Smith also stated that Soviet Military Intelligence had been
purchasing similar information from call services in Washington.”

Epstein’s involvement with intelligence during this period and his subsequent
sex trafficking activities suggest that these operations, as well as those practiced by
top officials at BCCI during this period, may have served as a sort of blueprint for
Epstein’s own, subsequent sex trafficking/sex blackmail operation with Ghislaine
Maxwell, daughter of the intelligence-connected Robert Maxwell.

THE AUSTRIAN PASSPORT MYSTERY

he mystery surrounding the exact nature of Epstein’s intelligence

connections forged during the 1980s deepened soon after Epstein’s 2019
arrest, when it was revealed in court that Epstein possessed in a safe “a passport
from a foreign country with a picture of the defendant (i.e. Epstein] under another
name.” The passport had been issued in the 1980s.” The contents of that safe were
used by the prosecution to argue that Epstein was a flight risk, as the safe with the
passport had also contained $70,000 in cash and 48 small diamonds.” It was later
revealed, during the course of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, that the safe had
actually contained multiple passports, but only the details of the aforementioned
passport “under another name” have been made public.” That passport was long
expired and would not have facilitated Epstein’s potential “quick getaway.”

The passport had been issued in Austria and listed Epstein’s alias and a Saudi
Arabian address. The alias of Epstein’s used in this passport remains unknown. The
passport showed stamps from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Saudi
Arabia.” These locations suggest deeper links to Khashoggi, who was from Saudi
Arabia and close to Saudi intelligence, as well as the Maxwell family, who had
family homes in both the United Kingdom and France. The visits to Spain may be
explained by Epstein’s involvement with recovering lost millions on behalf of
powerful Spaniards in 1982, including Ana Obregon’s father, as it related to the
collapse of Drysdale Government Securities.

Epstein’s defense lawyers had attempted to explain away the passport.
According to the Associated Press, they argued that “a friend gave it to him
[Epstein] in the 1980s after some Jewish-Americans were informally advised to
carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally
during a period when hijackings were more common”? This claim appears to be
related to concerns that followed the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 in 1976,
when Israeli and Jewish hostages were separated from other hostages based largely
on the passports in their possession.

Given that Epstein was unable to meet the conventional qualifications for an
Austrian passport — including long-term residency in Austria (the passport lists
him as a resident of Saudi Arabia) and fluency in German — it appears that the
only way to have acquired an Austrian passport was by unconventional means,

meaning assistance from a well-connected Austrian official or foreign diplomat
with clout in Austria.

The origins of this passport still remain shrouded in mystery. Some, such as
journalist Edward Szall, have speculated that the source was Ronald Lauder, heir
to the Estee Lauder fortune who served as the US ambassador to Austria from
April 1986 to October 1987. There is certainly a case to be made for Lauder being
the potential source. He would have been well-positioned to acquire such a
passport, particularly for the reason cited by Epstein’s attorneys that Jewish-
Americans could be targeted during travel, and in light of Lauder’s very public
concerns over threats Jews faced from certain terror groups during that period.

In addition, Lauder swam in the same social circles as Epstein’s former patron
Alan Greenberg as well as Donald Trump, another friend of Lauder and
Greenberg who began his friendship with Epstein in 1987.1% Lauder’s parents
were also close friends of Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor who was the lawyer of
Epstein’s client in the 1980s, Adnan Khashoggi.1” In 1987, Epstein also began his
formal relationship with Leslie Wexner, who shares strong “philanthropic”
connections to the Bronfmans with Lauder. Lauder would later take over Edgar
Bronfman’ role as head of the influential Zionist lobby organization the World
Jewish Congress in 2007. Wexner’s role in co-founding the Mega Group with
Charles Bronfman and other intersections of their philanthropic endeavors are
detailed in chapter 14.

Lauder also possessed some apparent connections to US intelligence as well
as close ties to Israel’s government, particularly during Benjamin Netanyahu first
term as Prime Minister, as Netanyahu’s successful 1996 campaign was largely
bankrolled by Lauder. Regarding a potential US intelligence connection, Lauder
co-founded the Eastern European broadcasting network CETV with Mark
Palmer, a former US diplomat, Kissinger aide, and Reagan speechwriter. Palmer is
best known for co-founding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an
organization often described as an accessory to US intelligence. NED’s first
president confessed to the Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today
was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA?”

In the case of Lauder’s Israel ties, Lauder himself has been alleged to have ties
to Israel's security and intelligence services, as he is a long-time, major funder of
IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university founded in 1994 and closely associated with

Israeli intelligence agencies1% Lauder even founded IDC Herzliya’s Lauder

School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy.“ In 2007, founding president
of IDC, Uriel Reichman, told the Jerusalem Post that “a central mission of ours is
the strengthening and development of Israel’s security forces”! Notably, Israeli
intelligence services have a history of using ambassadors abroad to procure false,
foreign passports for its operatives.12°

However, it is hard to know the likelihood of Lauder’s involvement in
procuring the passport as the date of issuance or the passport’s creation, as well as
the dates on the stamps to Saudi Arabia and other countries, remains unknown.
Prosecutors in the 2019 case against Epstein stated that the document had expired
in 1987, the year Lauder left his ambassadorship, but there is still a possibility it
had been given to Epstein for shorter term use during Lauder’s time in that
position.

Another possibility other than Lauder is the previous US ambassador to
Austria, Helene Von Damm, who held that post from 1983 to 1986, and was a
known attendee of parties on Roy Cohn’s yacht. Still another, and more likely,
possibility was Von Damm’s deputy, Felix Bloch, who was known to buck protocol
and was deemed insubordinate by both Von Damm and her successor Ronald
Lauder.

Bloch is a controversial figure who found himself investigated for illegal
activities by the FBI and was alleged to have had relationships with foreign
intelligence services, namely the Soviet Union. He had been the second-ranking
officer at the US embassy in Vienna until 1987, when he returned to the US to
head the State Department office handling regional affairs for Europe He was
suspended from his diplomatic post in mid-1989 and reportedly told investigators
that the Soviet Union had paid him “a lot of money” and that he had collaborated

with the Soviets for “many years,” per the New York Times. However, he was

never charged due to a purported “dearth of evidence” 2

If Bloch indeed had had ties to the KGB, it is possible he had helped furnish a
passport clandestinely for Epstein. This is because Robert Maxwell, who had
reportedly brought Epstein into his arms dealing-intelligence network by the mid-
1980s, had considerable ties to the KGB and could have likely arranged for the
Austrian passport through a man like Bloch. Among Maxwell’s close contacts in
the KGB was Vladimir Kryuchkov, who joined the KGB in 1967 and would serve
as the agency’s head from 1988 until August 1991, at which point he was involved

with a failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev" Another of Maxwell’s contacts

with KGB connections was Yuri Andropov, who served as head of the KGB from
1967 through 1982.42

FROM LEESE TO HOFFENBERG

le 1987, it would again be Douglas Leese who would further alter the course of

Epstein’s career, introducing him to Steven Jude Hoffenberg, who had founded
and led Towers Financial Corporation. Towers Financial was ostensibly a
collection agency, which originally focused on buying the debts people owed to
hospitals, banks, and so on. Yet, with Epstein’s assistance, it would soon become
much more.

Hoffenberg has stated that Douglas Leese was a principal at Towers Financial
and wanted Hoffenberg to hire Epstein at the company for a position specifically
related, originally at least, to the sale of securities. Per Hoffenberg, Douglas
Leese, in introducing Epstein to Hoffenberg, was interested in using Towers
Financial funds for the purpose of “embezzlement” and fraud and that this was
part of his motive in introducing Epstein to Hoffenberg.“* Julian Leese has
claimed that he worked briefly at Towers Financial and that he was the one who
first introduced his father to Hoffenberg.H* Criminal financial activity would take
place at Towers Financial, though those crimes would later be tied to Epstein and
Hoffenberg, not Douglas or Julian Leese. However, Hoffenberg, who ultimately
took the fall for the entire scheme, has stated that, not only was Douglas Leese
involved in the planning of these crimes, but so were Douglas Leese’s sons Julian
and Nicholas.

Hoffenberg told the Washington Post in 2019 that Leese had told him about
Epstein, “The guy’s a genius.... He’s great at selling securities. And he has no
moral compass.”!/® Hoffenberg, at the time, has admitted to having been “a
schemer,” stating that he “was always under investigation,” well before Towers
Financial Corporation collapsed and became known as one of the largest Ponzi
schemes in US history.

Hoffenberg, after founding Towers in the early 1970s, had had several run-ins
with the law. In one example, in 1980, Hoffenberg and two partners were “sued for
fraud over their acquisitions of a hardware supplier,” resulting in a $300,000
settlement.” It was also reported in the 1980s that “the Securities and Exchange
Commission accused Towers of selling $34 million in unregistered securities to
the public” and that charge was also settled, though with “no admission of

guilt” 118

Leese’s assertion about Epstein’s genius and lack of morals appeared to have
piqued the interest of Hoffenberg, perhaps because, with such talents, Hoffenberg
could execute bigger and more lucrative “schemes.’ Between 1987 and 1993,
Epstein was paid $25,000 a month by Hoffenberg. A year after they met, in 1988,
Hoffenberg would also provide Epstein with a $2 million loan that, per
Hoffenberg, Epstein never paid back.

The same year that Hoffenberg met Epstein and Epstein became involved in
Towers Financial, the company “began constructing one of the largest frauds in
history.’ The Washington Post detailed the origin of the scheme as follows:

The scheme began when Towers acquired the parent of two insurance companies, Associated
Life Insurance United Fire. Then, Towers launched a takeover attempt against Pan Am, the
once-proud but then-struggling airline.

To boost its chances, Towers told the SEC that it had an expert on its team: Epstein. Towers
called him “a financial advisor who has been familiar with Pan Am for approximately six years”
and was now advising Towers.

What neither regulators nor Pan Am knew was that, as Hoffenberg admitted later in court,
Towers had begun devising a classic Ponzi scheme, named for a swindler who defrauded
investors by moving money back and forth to create the false impression that profit was being
made.

After acquiring the insurance companies, Towers began siphoning funds from them to make
its bid for Pan Am look viable. Hoffenberg and Epstein also began pulling out hundreds of
thousands of dollars for themselves, court documents show. Hoffenberg issued more than 50
checks from the insurance companies to pay his stepdaughter’s tuition, expenses on his private
plane, and monthly $25,000 checks to Epstein.

“I advanced money to Epstein perpetually because I thought this thing could work,”
»119

Hoffenberg said. “He could sell anything. People loved him.
However, the takeover attempts of the airlines failed, causing problems for the
Towers-owned insurance companies. Hoffenberg would then siphon off an
additional $1.8 million from those companies in a failed attempt to acquire Emery
Air Freight, leaving the insurance companies insolvent and robbing thousands of
customers in Illinois and Ohio. The Illinois Department of Insurance and the SEC
then sued Towers. Hoffenberg has said that some of these takeover attempts
involved assistance from people at Epstein’s former employer Bear Stearns, but
qualified that it was “not a lot” 2°
Yet, the duo of Epstein and Hoffenberg showed no signs of slowing down and
instead expanded, developing a separate Ponzi scheme in 1988 that involved
selling around $272 million in promissory notes, where they were “offering
returns of 12 to 16 percent and marketing them largely to people of modest

means, among them widows, retirees, and people with disabilities”? Money

from the sale of the promissory notes was used to convince Illinois regulators that
the company was not actually insolvent and that the insurance companies had
sufficient capital to cover claims. Two years later, in 1990, they would engage in
similar behavior, selling about $210 million in bonds and filing false financial
statements to cover their tracks.12% Regarding these acts, Hoffenberg would tell
the Washington Post in 2019, “I call it a turnover. You raise a dollar here, you pay a
dollar there. Epstein was brilliant at this.”

During this period, Epstein and Hoffenberg grew very close. “They traveled
everywhere together — on Hoffenberg’s plane, all around the world, they were
always together,” one source told Vicky Ward in 2003.+ Hoffenberg, on the
matter of their then-close relationship would later tell CBS News “He was my best
friend for years. My closest friend for years.... We ran a team of people on Wall
Street, investment people that raised these billion dollars illegally. He was my guy,
my wingman” 124

Hoffenberg later claimed to have fired Epstein in the early 1990s because
Epstein “was stealing too much. I couldnt supervise him.”422 However, the
manner in which they parted ways is disputed. Even if Hoffenberg did cut ties
with Epstein well before he was arrested in 1993, Hoffenberg did seem to
maintain ties with Epstein/Maxwell-connected networks until the very end. For
example, when Hoffenberg moved to buy the New York Post, which he had done at
Governor Mario Cuomo’ request, he used the same lawyers that Robert Maxwell
had used to take over the New York Daily News just a few years prior to secure that
transaction./2° It’s also worth noting that the way both Hoffenberg and Maxwell
played up their respective “rescues” of well-known New York newspapers was
remarkably similar.

Shortly after Hoffenberg became the New York Post’s “savior,” he was sued by
the SEC and Towers Financial filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The Ponzi
scheme had imploded.

Soon, Hoffenberg appeared in front of a Chicago grand jury, in November
1993, to which he confirmed while being questioned that “Jeffrey Epstein was the
person in charge of the [fraudulent] transactions.” When asked by federal
prosecutor Edward Kohler if Epstein had been trying to manipulate the price of
stocks, Hoffenberg responded affirmatively. Kohler’s line of questioning and
overarching narrative at the hearing painted Epstein as the “technical wizard” of

the Towers Financial fraud; yet, somehow, three months later, Epstein’s name
mysteriously disappeared from the case.

Hoffenberg was arrested in 1994 and pled guilty in April 1995. Hoffenberg
had been offered a reduced sentence by prosecutors in exchange for information
about co-conspirators, but either prosecutors were no longer interested in
pursuing Epstein or Hoffenberg chose not to talk about Epstein.128 Other Towers
executives, Mitchell Brater and Michael Rosoff, were charged for their role in the
Towers Financial schemes, but Epstein was never charged.122

Hoffenberg has since alleged that he only pled guilty at the behest of his then-
lawyer in order to reduce his sentence. His lawyer at the time, Jeffrey Hoffman,
told the court that the guilty plea and accompanying confession from Hoftenberg
was offered “to spare Mr. Hoffenberg the trauma, embarrassment, and expense of
a trial,” according to the New York Times.32

Hoffenberg has since claimed that, if his case had gone to trial, not only
Epstein’s role in the fraud, but also the true extent of the Epstein-Leese
connection would have been exposed. If so, this would have been damaging for
several parties, including the intelligence agencies to which both Epstein and
Leese were allegedly connected. There is evidence that Hoffenberg did attempt to
withdraw his guilty plea after it had been filed, but this effort was mentioned in
press reports at the time as having been “based in part on claims of mental illness,”
with Hoffenberg claiming he had been “mentally impaired” when he had pled
guilty.

Hoffenberg would attempt to file a lawsuit against Epstein in 2016, but
Hoffenberg later withdrew the lawsuit, saying that victims of the Towers Financial
fraud “may be in a better position to pursue and assert their own claims” against
Epstein. $% A similar lawsuit was filed in 2018 by Towers Financial note and
bondholders, but was dismissed, suggesting that efforts to shield Epstein from
culpability in the Towers case continued nearly up until his 2019 arrest.83
Notably, that complaint alleged that Hoffenberg, despite having been offered a
reduced sentence for offering information about co-conspirators in the early
1990s, did not provide any useable intel to investigators on Epstein until his 2016
lawsuit. The Daily Beast reported in 2019 that, in the early 1990s, Hoftenberg had
never made an attempt to implicate Epstein prior to the 2016 lawsuit, but this was
contradicted by reporting from the Washington Post, which referenced

Hoffenberg’s November 1993 testimony that did both mention and implicate
Epstein. +4

According to Vicky Ward’s 2003 report on Jeffrey Epstein in Vanity Fair, it had
been Hoffenberg who, in 1987, had originally “set Epstein up in the offices he still
occupies in the Villard Houses, on Madison Avenue, across a courtyard from the
restaurant Le Cirque.’ If that is the case, as other reports also claim, it would mean
that Hoffenberg directly connected Epstein to a network involving the Gouletas
family. Evangeline Gouletas appeared to share that very office directly with
Epstein.

In his article “My Tea with Jeffrey Epstein,’ Edward Jay Epstein writes how in
the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein introduced him to “Evangeline Gouletas-Carey, the
wife of former governor Hugh Carey, who shared an office with Epstein at the
Villard Houses”! That the two shared an office is confirmed by Business Insider:
“John Catsimatidis, who owns the Manhattan grocery chain Gristedes, told Insider
that he met Epstein through his friend Evangeline Gouletas, a real estate executive
who shared an office with Epstein in the building of the then-Helmsley Hotel in
the early 1990s.”3°

The Helmsley Hotel was the name of a Manhattan luxury hotel that was open
from 1981 to 1992, at which point it was purchased by the Sultan of Brunei+*2
The complex encompassed a portion of the Villard Houses, confirming that the
shared Epstein/Gouletas-Carey office alluded to by both Edward Jay Epstein and
John Catsimatidis were one and the same. Given the timing, it seems as though
Hoffenberg helped forge the connection between Epstein and the Gouletas.

There seems to be special significance to the Gouletas connection. The
Gouletas family’s lawyer — Allan Tessler — would join the board of Leslie Wexner’s
The Limited in 1987, the same year that Epstein formally allied with Hoffenberg
at Tower Financial and that Epstein became a financial advisor for Wexner. This
could potentially mean that Hoffenberg may have had a role in the genesis of the
Wexner-Epstein relationship by helping set Epstein up with Gouletas. As we shall
see, the Gouletas had considerable ties, throughout the 1980s, to organized crime-
linked businessmen in Wexner’s inner circle, corrupt New York politicians
bankrolled by the Bronfmans and other companies and characters that have
already been explored in previous chapters of this book.

Endnotes

14
15

Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,’ Vanity Fair, March 1, 2003,

derosa.html.

Paula Froelich, “Epstein Reportedly Had Secret ‘Lair’ at Famed Michigan Art School,’ New
secret-lair-at-interlochen-school/.

Jimmy Falun Gong, Twitter post, February 17, 2021, https://twitter.com/JimmyFalun-
Gong/status/1362244440274919425

Landon Thomas Jr, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,’ New York
Magazine, October 28, 2002,

ews/people/n_7912/.

Stewart, “Rare Cello.’

Michael Robotham, “The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Secret Love; Revealed: The Unlikely
Romance Between a Business Spy and the Crooked Financier’s Favourite Daughter,’ Mail on
Sunday (London), November 15, 1992, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/The-mystery-of-Ghislaine-Maxwell_s-secret-love REVEALED-
1.pdf.

Stewart, “Rare Cello.’

Thomas Volscho, “Jeffrey Epstein Dodged Questions About Sex With His Dalton Prep-School

dodged-questions-about-sex-with-his-dalton-prep-school-students.
Marie Brenner, “The Untold Tale of Young William Barr Among the Manhattan Liberals,’
Vanity Fair, October 7, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-untold-tale-of-
young-william-barr,

Gumby4christ, Twitter post, April 23, 2021,
https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1385635 127636774917.

“Columbia Assistant Dean To Be Dalton Headmaster,’ New York Times, March 24, 1964,
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/24/archives/columbia-assistant-dean-to-be-dalton-
head-master.html; Gumby4christ, Twitter post, April 23, 2021,
https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1385635 127636774917.

Brenner, “Young William Barr.’

Volscho, “Epstein Dodged Questions.”

Jerry Lambe, “The Dalton School's ‘Epstein-Barr’ Problem,’ Law & Crime, July 13, 2019,
school/.

Linda Robertson and Aaron Brezel, “How Epstein Went from Teaching to Wall Street,’ Virgin

teaching-to-wall-street/article_ 59c0234e-cf7d-59c3-96a7-bb8a04dacaa8.html.

17
18
19
20
21

22

23
24
25
26
237

28

29

30
31

32

33
34
35

36

37
38
39

40

Volscho, “Epstein Dodged Questions.”

Lambe, “Dalton School's ‘Epstein-Barr’ Problem”

Thomas, “International Moneyman.”

Ward, “Talented Mr. Epstein.”

Linda Robertson and Aaron Brezel, “Poor, smart and desperate to be rich’: How Epstein went
from teaching to Wall Street,” Miami Herald, July 16, 2019,
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article232678997.html.

Charlie Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein: How He Maintained Wall Street
Connections While Downplaying Child Sex Accusations,’ FOX Business, July 26, 2019,

ey-epstein-wall-street-connections-child-sex-trafficking.

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.’

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.’

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.”

Michael A. Hiltzik, “Financier Found Guilty of Illegal Insider Trading : Tome Ordered to Give
Up $3.5-Million Profit From Seagram Takeover Attempt,’ Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1986,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-04-fi-8701-story.html.

Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, 1st. Syracuse
University Press ed, Modern Jewish History (N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 378.
H. Erich Heinemann, “Bank of New York and Empire Trust Agree in Principle on a Merger
Plan,’ New York Times, March 18, 1966,

and-empire-trust-agree-in.html.

1975 Bankers Almanac and Year Book, published by University of Minnesota, p. 499,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/ /Co8RAQAAMAAJ.

Hiltzik, “Financier Found Guilty.’

William H. Meyers, “Megadealer for the Rothschilds,” New York Times, December 4, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/magazine/meagdealer-for-the-rothschilds.html.
Dennis B. Levine, “The Inside Story of an Inside Trader,” CNN Money, May 21, 1990,
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/05/21/73553/index.htm.
Levine, “Inside Story,’; Meyers, “Megadealer.’

Meyers, “Megadealer.’

“Photograph from Malcolm Forbes’ 70th Birthday Party,’ 1989, https://www.gettyim-

maxwell-during-fotograf%C3%ADa-de-noticias/105903255.
Leland Nally, “Jeffrey Epstein, My Very, Very Sick Pal,” Mother Jones, August 23, 2019,

pal/.

“Epstein’s Black Book,” https://epsteinsblackbook.com/black-book-images/22.jpg.
“Rothschild Shuffles Top Ranks,’ New York Times, June 9, 1992,
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/09/business/rothschild-shuffles-top-ranks.html.
Steve Lipman, “Federation's ‘Ace’ Giver Remembered,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 29,

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.’

41
42

43

44

45

46
47

48

49

50

51
52

53
54

55
56

57

58

59

60

Ward, “Talented Mr. Epstein”
“J. EPSTEIN & COMPANY, INC,” OpenCorporates,

Janna Herron and Kevin McCoy, “From Private Island to Private Jet: What Is ‘billionaire’
Jeffrey Epstein’s Net Worth?, USA TODAY, July 14, 2019,

billionaire-or-not/1708479001/.

Jesse Kornbluth, “I Was a Friend of Jeffrey Epstein; Here’s What I Know,’ Salon, July 9, 2019,
James Patterson, John Connolly, and Tim Malloy, Filthy Rich (Hatchette Book Group, 2017),
99.

Ward, “Talented Mr. Epstein”

Nigel Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer; She’s the Daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's Manipulating
His Jetset Lifestyle,” Evening Standard (London), January 22, 2001, https://www.mintpress-
news.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ANDREW_S-FIXER SHE S-THE-DAUGHTER-OF-
ROBERT-MAXWELL-AND-1.pdf.

NY Magazine Editors, “The High Society That Surrounded Jeffrey Epstein,” Intelligencer, July

contacts.html.
Edward Szall, “Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Mentor’ Talks to TruNews,” TruNews, July 30, 2020,

Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’

“Douglas Sims Leese,’ Graces Guide To British Industrial History, https://www.graces-
guide.co.uk/Douglas Sims Leese,

NY Magazine Editors, “High Society.’

Colin Maloney, “Downriver Nonprofit Received Donation from Foundation Associated with
Jeffrey Epstein,” News Herald, August 13, 2019,
https://www.thenewsherald.com/news/downriver-nonprofit-received-donation-from-
foundation-associated-with-jeffrey-epstein/article_a2512d98-bdcf-11e9-8a43-
53b212666c96.html.

McCormack, Defiance.

Matthew Beckett, “New Series: The Country House Revealed - South Wraxall Manor,
Wiltshire,’ The Country Seat, May 10, 2011, https://thecountryseat.org.uk/tag/rood-ashton-
house/; “A Farming Life: Michael George Pope,’ Box People and Places, June 2015,

Offshore alerts forum, saved image, https://unlimitedhangout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2022/07/Photo_2022-07-01-12.22.52.jpeg.

“House Of Wraxall Limited,” Companies London,
https://www.companieslondon.com/uk/01359147/house-of-wraxall-limited.

Matt Schaffer, Winning the Countertrade War: New Export Strategies for America (New York:
Wiley, 1989), 173-74.

Who's Who 1985: An Annual Biographical Dictionary (London: A. & C. Black, 1985), 1021.

61

62

63

64

65

66
67

68

69
70

71
72

73
74
75

76
‘fi

78

Investigate Design, “Owen Glenn's Shady Friends,” Investigate Magazine, February 19, 2008,
Juliette Garside, “Dukes of Westminster Pumped Millions into Secretive Offshore Firms,” The
Guardian, November 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/07/duke-
of-westminster-offshore-firms-wealth-paradise-papers.

“Case History No. 8 Swiss American Bank” (Swiss American National Bank),
http://archivo.lavoz.com.ar/2001/0305/112.pdf.

“Norinco Lorad Limited,” OpenCorporates,

Corporation Search, n.d.), https://www.hkcorporationsearch.com/companies/0131346/.
William C. Triplett Il, “China's Weapons Mafia,’ Washington Post, October 27, 1991,

Mafia/5a0f8884-8953-4bbe-9ae8-fc72fb09442f/.

Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’

Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’ For Khashoggi’s Mossad ties at this time see Victor Ostrovsky and
Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception, 1st U.S. ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 327,
https://archive.org/details/isbn 9780312926144.

Adam Lusher, “Adnan Khashoggi: The ‘whoremonger’ Whose Arms Deals Funded a Playboy
Life of Decadence and ‘Pleasure Wives,” The Independent, October 29, 2019,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/adnan-khashoggi-dead-saudi-arms-

a7778031.html.
Lusher, “Adnan Khashoggi-”
Whitney Webb, “The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton Relationship,’

bill-clinton-relationship/261455/; Richard J. Aldrich, “Prince Andrew Laid Bare by Wikileaks:
Duke of York Journalist Rant,’ Mail Online, September 28, 2021,
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10035265/Prince-Andrew-laid-bare-Wikileaks-
Duke-York-ranted-journalists.html.

NY Magazine Editors, “High Society.’

Chris Blackhurst, “Littlewoods Prompts Trader’s Arrest for Bribes,” The Independent, July 26,

1330625.html.

Triplett, “China's Weapons Mafia.”

Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1988), 424.

Dominick Dunne, “Khashoggi’s Fall,’ Vanity Fair, September 15, 2008, https://www.vani-
tyfair.com/magazine/1989/09/dunne198909.

Lusher, “Adnan Khashoggi-”

John Taylor, “Trump Princess: Inside Donald Trump's Lavish 86m Superyacht,’ Boats
International, December 1, 2021, https://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/editorial-
“Trump Bought Yacht from “World’s Largest Arms Dealer” (Democratic Coalition Against
Trump, October 31, 2016), https://youtu.be/yuWMHS5TDSbE.

79

80

81

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96

Staff, “The Bcci-Cia Connection: Just How Far Did It Go?” Newsweek, December 6, 1992,
https://www.newsweek.com/bcci-cia-connection-just-how-far-did-it-go-195454.

Marcus Baram, “Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump,’ The New Yorker, April 14,
donald-trump.

Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign
Relations, 102nd Congress 2nd Session US Senate, December 1992, 72,
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=CoKC-Sxb9kIC.

Cheri Seymour, The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation Into the Octopus and the
PROMIS Software Scandal, 1st ed (Walterville, Oregon: TrineDay, 2010), 37.

“Andrew Thornton Part 01 of 01,’ FBI File, https://vault.fbi.gov/andrew-thornton/andrew-
thornton-part-01-of-01.

John R. Schindler, “It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein Was a Soy—But Whose? Observer, July
10, 2019,

Whitney Webb, “Former Israeli Spy Ari Ben-Menashe on Israel's Relationship with Epstein,’
MintPress News, December 13, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben-menashe-is-
rael-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/263465/.

Zev Shalev, “Blackmailing America,’ Narativ, September 26, 2019,
https://narativ.org/2019/09/26/blackmailing-america/.

Webb, “Ari Ben-Menashe.”

Emma Parry and Chris White, “Jeffrey Epstein Would Boast to Pals That He Was Selling Prince
Andrew's Secrets to Mossad, Former Mentor Claims,’ The Sun, January 24, 2020,

Shalev, “Blackmailing America.”

“Bleznaks rose to still-cool occasion,’ Palm Beach Daily News, April 27, 2008, p. 17,
https://archive.ph/1tufZ.

A Public Hearing to Consider the Boy Prostitution and Pornography, New York State Select
Committee on Crime, 1982, 58-59,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190225212253/https:/disobe-
dientmedia.com/dm/NY_Sex_Trafficking.pdf.

Hearing to Consider the Boy Prostitution and Pornography, 59.

Hearing to Consider the Boy Prostitution and Pornography, 61.

Tom Winter and David K. Li, “Jeffrey Epstein Had Cash, Diamonds and a Foreign Passport
Stashed in Safe, Prosecutors Say,’ NBC News, July 15, 2019,

passport-stashed-safe-prosecutors-n1029851.
Tracy Connor, “Epstein Says Friend Gave Him Fake Foreign Passport Used in 4 Countries,” The

passport-was-used-in-saudi-arabia-and-other-countries.

Jacob Shamsian, “FBI Agents Used a Saw to Open a Safe in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan
Mansion That Held Hard Drives and Diamonds,’ Insider, December 6, 2021,

97
98

99

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101

102

103

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105

106

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108

109

110

111

112

2021-12.
Connor, “Fake Foreign Passport.”
“The Latest: Politicians Praise Jeffrey Epstein’s Bail Ruling,” AP NEWS, July 18, 2019,

14dcf4ad8e2740ed-89194712252be9e8.

“1976: Israelis Rescue Entebbe Hostages,” BBC, July 4, 1976, http://news.bbc.co.uk/on-
thisday/hi/dates/stories/july/4/newsid_2786000/2786967.stm.

Shelby White, “It’s All in Who You Know (and Who They Know),’ New York Times, November

they-know.html; Ivylise Simones, “The Trump Files: Donald Perfectly Explains Why He
Doesn't Have a Presidential Temperament,’ Mother Jones, August 30, 2016,

temperament/.

Peter Manso, “My Bizarre Dinner Party with Donald Trump, Roy Cohn and Estee Lauder,’
POLITICO Magazine, May 27, 2016,

213923, Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 369, 424.

David Ignatius, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups,’ Washington Post,
September 22, 1991,
new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/.

Asa Winstanley, “How Israeli Spies Are Flooding Facebook and Twitter,’ The Electronic
Intifada, June 25, 2019, https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israeli-spies-are-
flooding-face-book-and-twitter/27596.

“Ronald S. Lauder Founder,’ Reichman University,
https://www.runi.ac.il/en/schools/government/about-lauder/.

Haviv Rettig Gur, “It’s All in the Plans,’ Jerusalem Post, June 11, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130512150049/http://www,jpost.com/Features//Article.asp
x?id=64503.

“Israeli Secret Service Might Use Fake Irish Passports,” AI Bawaba, October 11, 2016,
https://www.albawaba.com/editorchoice/israeli-secret-service-might-use-fake-irish-
passports-891814.

Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 393.

“Dearth of Evidence May Block Prosecution of Diplomat Bloch,” Deseret News, December 17,
1989, https://www.deseret.com/1989/12/17/18836992/dearth-of-evidence-may-block-
prose-cution-of-diplomat-bloch.

“Felix Bloch, the Career Diplomat Suspected of Espionage, Told...,” UPI, July 28, 1989,

espio-nage-told/1302617601600/.
Deseret News, “Death of Evidence.”

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul, 1st Carroll & Graf ed (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 13.

Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 8.

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122

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124

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127
128
129

130

131

132

133
134
135

Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’
Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’
McCormack, Defiance.

Marc Fisher and Jonathan O'Connell, “Final Evasion: For 30 Years, Prosecutors and Victims
Tried to Hold Jeffrey Epstein to Account. At Every Turn, He Slipped Away,’Washington Post,

away/2019/08/10/30b-c947a-bb8a-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html.
George Garneau, “Averting a Crisis,” Editor & Publisher, May 4, 2011,

averting-a-crisis-p/.

Garneau, “Averting a Crisis.’

Fischer and O'Connell, “Final Evasion.’

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.’

Fischer and O'Connell, “Final Evasion.’

Kate Briquelet and Tracy Connor, “Ponzi Scheme Victims Say Epstein Swindled Them,’ The

Hoffenberg-swindle-dollar460-million-in-ponzi-scheme.
Ward, “Talented Mr. Epstein.”

Brian Pascus and Mola Lenghi, “Jeffrey Epstein Worked at Financial Firm That Engaged in
Massive Ponzi Scheme in 1980s and 1990s,” CBS News, August 13, 2019,

hoffenberg-who-committed-ponzi-scheme-crimes/.

Gasparino, “The Woes of Jeffrey Epstein.”

Briquelet and Connor, “Ponzi Scheme Victims,’; Szall, “Epstein’s Mentor.’
Fischer and O'Connell, “Final Evasion.”

Pascus and Lenghi, “Jeffrey Epstein Worked at Financial Firm.’

“Towers Financial Figures Charged,’ New York Times, April 17, 1997,
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/17/business/towers-financial-figures-charged.html.

Diana B. Henriques, “Hoffenberg Confesses to Ponzi Scheme,’ New York Times, April 21, 1995,

scheme.html.
Dow Jones, “Hoffenberg Gets A Delay Again,” New York Times, May 23, 1996,

Eaton, “Judge Planning Severe Sentence For Hoffenberg In Fraud Case,’ New York Times,
March 6, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/06/business/judge-planning-severe-
sentence-for-hoffenberg-in-fraud-case.html.

Herron and McCoy, “Private Island to Private Jet,’; Briquelet and Connor, “Ponzi Scheme
Victims.”

Herron and McCoy, “Private Island to Private Jet.”
Briquelet and Connor, “Ponzi Scheme Victims,’; Fischer and O'Connell, “Final Evasion.’
Edward Jay Epstein, “My Tea with Jeffrey Epstein,’ Airmail, September 14, 2019,

136

137

Angela Wang, “Billionaires Carl Icahn and John Catsimatidis Appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s 1997
Address Book,’ Business Insider, July 8, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/carl-icahn-
john-catsimatidis-jeffrey-epsteins-address-book-2021-6,

Years later in 2002, Epstein would later take a suspect series flights on his plane, the so-
called “Lolita Express’, along with Bill Clinton that included a visit with the Sultan of Brunei.
That flight is discussed in Chapter 19.

CHAPTER 12

THE PROPERTY DEVELOPER

THE GOULETAS’ REAL ESTATE EMPIRE

he real estate empire of the Gouletas clan — brothers Victor and Nicholas,

and sister Evangeline - was a vast, interlocking enterprise composed of
multiple layers of ownership, comprised of firms nestled within holding
companies and with tendrils that spread out from its capital city of Chicago and
spanned from New York City to San Diego.

Each of the Gouletas, through individually-owned firms, were the
shareholders in Ambelos Corp., the 100% owner of their flagship company,
American Invesco Corp. There was also Tamco Holding Co., another company
owned by the family. More specifically, this was a holding company that
controlled Tamco Industries Inc. American Invesco would pour its money into
Tamco, in order to both finance the company’s operations — which consisted
mainly of acquiring other companies, in an embrace of the wild corporate
takeover culture of the 1980s - and to protect the Gouletas’ wealth from the
creditors that so often dogged Invesco.

It’s actually something of a mystery where the Gouletas’ wealth came from in
the first place. Newspaper records show that, in the early 1970s, American Invesco
peddled apartments, and then condominiums, but the units that they offered were
unremarkable. Then, suddenly, sometime between 1976 and 1978, their fortunes
exploded. The Gouletas became the source of condominiums in Chicago, and
American Invesco was turning millions upon millions over in annual profit.

One explanation that has been offered for this sudden change was that the
Gouletas were backed by Greek shipping money, particularly that of Aristotle
Onassis. These rumors were fueled by American Invesco’s interest in purchasing
half of New York’s Olympic Tower, which had been developed and co-owned by
Onassis. Another was that their coffers were flush with money from the Middle
East. This notion arose because one of Invesco’s partners was the J.P. Construction
Company, which specialized in construction projects in that particular region.

Another, perhaps more likely although ultimately unproven, allegation is that
the Gouletas were fronting for organized crime interests. Fortune magazine, in
1981, alluded to an “anonymous report received ... by Congressman Benjamin
Rosenthal, chairman of the House subcommittee on commerce, consumer, and
monetary affairs” that “traced American Invesco’s seed money back to Greek

mobsters in Chicago” There was also the issue of a “confidential intelligence
bulletin, issued in 1978 by the Los Angeles County district attorney” that raised
the possibility that American Invesco was tied to “Briar Management Co., ‘a
vehicle for organized crime infiltration of Chicago real estate”?

Other hints of potential organized crime connections can be found among
some of American Invesco’s management. A long-time president of the company
was Douglas Crocker II, who, by the time he linked up with the Gouletas, had
amassed a serious track record in the high-stakes real estate game. According to a
1987 issue of the Chicago Tribune, one of Crocker’s early business partners was
Sam Zell, another wizard in the Chicago real estate scene who, like Ronald
Lauder, is a major funder of the intelligence-connected IDC Herzliya. The same
article describes another “partner in some of those early ventures” as being Burton
Kanter — the mob-linked attorney who joined together with CIA banker Paul
Helliwell to form management Castle Bank & Trust, the offshore hot money
vortex located in Grand Bahamas’ Freeport (see chapter 1).* In 1976, Kanter, Zell,
and two other associates were charged with having used Castle Bank accounts to
evade taxes on the sale of a Reno, Nevada, apartment complex that the group —
along with other principals, such as Florida senator George Smathers (who had
boasted of his own ties to organized crime) — had purchased in 1969.

In 1983, the Gouletas decided to break into the savings and loan game.
Through Tamco, they purchased Imperial Corp., a holding company that
controlled Imperial Savings and Loan. Imperial controlled numerous thrifts
scattered across the United States - at one point, these totalled 40 different
institutions with $6.8 billion in assets. The holding company had fallen under the
control of Saul Steinberg, the corporate raider, friend of Michael Milken, and
eager client of the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond pipeline. Shortly
thereafter, “he split Imperial Corp’s S & L operations into two entities, Imperial
Savings in San Diego and Gibraltar Savings in Texas.”2 Gibraltar passed through a
chain of owners before finally ending up in the hands of Ronald Perelman,
another participant in the Milken junk bond universe. Twenty-five percent of
Imperial was then bought by Tamco.

In keeping with tradition, Imperial under the control of the Gouletas saw its
portfolio swell with Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bonds. It also tapped other
Milken clients for financing. Among these was Fred Carr's First Executive Corp,
which, by 1990, owned nearly $10 billion worth of debt sold through Drexel. First

Executive went insolvent in 1991 and was taken over by the State of California.
This followed Imperial’s own spectacular collapse at the end of 1990. In all
likelihood, the two collapses were intertwined, as the run-up to their parallel
breakdowns was characterized by highly irregular business activities that appear to
have indicated a large-scale case of stock manipulation.

Those “irregularities” played out as follows: by 1987, the thrift industry as a
whole was destabilizing, and a massive cascade of failures was well under way. In
late summer, the Gouletas defaulted on a massive loan from First Executive. While
Tamco still owned a big chunk of the company, majority ownership was edged out
by Fred Carr’s insurance firm. Yet, by October, the markets were in turmoil, and
the stock price of Imperial was plummeting. It was at this point that strange moves
began to be made. As Peter Brewton writes, “who should come to the rescue —
none other than Larry Mizel’s M.D.C. Holdings, another one of Milken’s big
clients.” (M.D.C. had “raised more than $700 million from Drexel junk bonds.”)&

M.D.C. — which continues to exist today — was a major development company
with a slew of subsidiaries that specialized in things like home construction.
Brewton points out that the manager for Mizel’s various investment trusts was
Calvin Eisenberg, formerly of Burton Kanter’s law firm.? Given the ties between
Invesco manager Douglas Crocker and Kanter’s circle, it appears that there was a
shared social network or milieu, where the worlds of real estate, organized crime,
and intelligence intersected in Chicago.

The way that M.D.C. “saved the day” was by buying, between November 1987
and February 1988, massive shares of Imperial, causing the stock price to rise
from $7.50 to $12.50. Then, between June and September of 1988, the company
sold off all its stock for “nominal gain? +?

M.D.C’s timing was auspicious. In October 1988, regulators opened an
investigation into a potential “daisy chain” operation involving M.D.C., Silverado
Savings in Colorado, Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings in California, San Jacinto
Savings in Dallas, and its parent company Southmark - a “vulture capitalist”
institution that feasted on the remains of dead thrifts.4 Daisy chains made the
illusion of liquidity where it may actually have been scarce, and entailed a network
of financial institutions making loans to one another, swapping stock and flipping
properties among themselves. These complex wranglings were also deployed by
Milken to circulate junk bonds, by making them look more attractive. With that in
mind, it’s not surprising at all that when the regulators were looking at this specific

cluster of entities, “particular interest was whether securities had been ‘parked’ at
the insured institutions by Drexel Burnham and other brokers.”

There were close ties between all of these institutions. Charles Keating of
Lincoln was a major Drexel Burnham client, while Southmark was “the largest
estate-based conglomerate financed by Milken.”4* Over at Silverado Savings,
Colorado attorney Norman Brownstein, who also did legal work on behalf of
Larry Mizel and M.D.C., had a position on the board. Brownstein was also
reportedly a co-trustee for some of Mizel’s investment trusts, alongside the
aforementioned Calvin Eisenberg.“*

Brownstein had other clients of interest. There was “Ohio shopping center
magnate Edward DeBartolo,’ and - importantly - American Invesco. DeBartolo’s
considerable ties to both organized crime and Leslie Wexner are discussed in the
next chapter. The Gouletas’ ties to this “daisy chain” didn't stop there, however.
Serving as president of Southmark and vice president and chief loan officer of its
subsidiary, San Jacinto Savings, was Joseph Grosz — formerly of American Invesco,
where he had served under Douglas Crocker.*®

Given the ties between all the individuals involved and the way that the events
overlapped at the time, it seems very likely that M.D.C’s pump and dump of
Imperial stock was connected directly to the “daisy chain” operations between
M.D.C., Lincoln, Silverado, and Southmark.

ALLAN TESSLER: THE GOULETAS’ ATTORNEY

s Imperial was nearing collapse, Allan R. Tessler, the Gouletas family’s

attorney and board member at a number of their enterprises, was briefly
appointed CEO of the thrift combine. His goal was to restructure the
organization, salvage its finances, and get it up and running again. In this task,
Tessler failed. It is a black spot on his long career, which has included some
curious connections.

Tessler was a mergers and acquisitions specialist from the New York City law
firm Shea & Gould. The firm’s partners and clients were prominent. They had, for
example, represented Carmine de Sapio, the last boss of the Tammany Hall
political machine, close associate of mobsters like Frank Costello as well as a close
personal friend of Roy Cohn. One of the firm’s partners was Thomas A. Macioce,
brought in by the Vatican in 1989 to help clean up its scandal-ridden bank.+®
Macioce, who chaired Allied Stores, was also on the board of Capital Cities, which
took over the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1985. There he had
served alongside William Casey, who worked for the company between 1976 and
1981, at which point Casey became director of the CIA.“ Casey continued to
hold a significant amount of stock in Capital Cities well into his tenure as CIA
director.18

This wasn’t Casey’s only connection to Shea & Gould. Milton Gould, the
firm’s co-founder and senior partner, was Casey's friend and lifelong attorney. It’s
fair to say that Shea & Gould wouldn't even have existed if it weren’t for Casey, as
he had introduced Gould and his fellow co-founder William Shea to one another
sometime in the 1960s.72

It isn’t clear exactly when Tessler became counsel to the Gouletas, but it was
certainly prior to their acquisition of Imperial, and probably dated back to the late
1970s, right around the time that the family’s wealth began to rapidly expand.

Throughout this same period, Tessler had another important client: Dr. Earl
W. Brian, the Ronald Reagan crony and one of the main architects of the PROMIS
software bugging and related scandals (see chapter 9). Brian was also head of the
venture capital firm Infotechnology. In 1990, Infotechnology was teetering on the
brink of collapse, with cash flow problems tearing the company apart. Tessler, in a
move that directly paralleled his actions at Imperial not even a year prior, became

Infotechnology’s co-CEO, with a mandate for a corporate restructuring that
entailed selling off subsidiary firms, among other things.”2

By his own admission, Tessler had been involved with Brian's business affairs
since around 1977. This aligned with Brian's time as president of a technology
firm called Xonics - and more specifically, with an SEC law-suit against the
company for, among other things, artificially manipulating its stock price to raise
money for acquisitions. Xonics managed to limp on for several years before it
finally collapsed, at which point Brian took control of a subsidiary company called
Hadron. As noted in chapter 9, it was Brian, operating through Hadron, who
attempted to acquire the PROMIS software from William Hamilton's Inslaw on
behalf of the Department of Justice, and he, as well as Hadron, remained deeply
tied to the events that surrounded the software's eventual theft and illicit use by
intelligence agencies.

Tessler himself makes a brief appearance in the annals of the “Inslaw Affair”
itself. William Hamilton of Inslaw Inc. charged that a venture capital firm called
53 Street Ventures, which held a stake in Inslaw, was party to the Hadron-DOJ
conspiracy to acquire PROMIS. An affidavit by Hamilton states that 53" Street’s
founder and owner, Daniel Tessler, was “a relative of Alan [sic] Tessler, the senior
partner in the New York City law firm of Shea and Gould responsible for Brian
and Hadron’s mergers and acquisitions work”™ Daniel Tessler’s wife, Patricia
Cloherty, was reported to have told an officer at Hambro International Bank that
she “knew all about’ Brian’s role in the INSLAW matter.” The report of special
counsel Nicholas J. Bua — a dismissal of Hamilton and Inslaw’s allegations — says
that Daniel Tessler met with Inslaw concerning potential investments into the
company on behalf of another investor in the company, Hambro International. He
further denied that he was related to Allan Tessler and that he or his wife knew
Earl Brian.

In the “Rebuttal of the Bua Report”, drafted by Hamilton's lawyers, it is
pointed out that Daniel’s statement concerning his and wife’s unfamiliarity with
Brian was unlikely to be true: Cloherty served alongside Brian on the board of
National Association of Small Business Investment Companies in 1980.22 The
question of a family relation between Daniel and Allan Tessler is not mentioned,
however.

As detailed in chapter 9, the CIA's modification of the PROMIS software was
alleged to have taken place at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California.

Cabazon, at this point, was under the dominion of a mobster (and possible CIA
asset) named John Nichols, who had managed to take control of the reservation
from the tribal government after becoming the manager of a bingo hall - and
projected casino project — at the reservation. Between 1981 and 1983, Nichols
and his partner G. Wayne Reeder, a land developer of ill repute, steered Cabazon
into a joint venture with the Wackenhut Corporation and several smaller
companies. The multifaceted plan — which never came to full fruition, despite a
surprising number of dead bodies turning up along the way — included a scheme
for an arms research, development, and manufacturing plant. It seems that the
weapons made at Cabazon were to be deployed into the different theatres of the
Reagan administrations various covert wars. For instance, as previously
mentioned, it is a matter of record that representatives of the Contras attended a
meeting at Cabazon to observe a weapons demonstration.

According to a Riverside, California, district attorney intelligence report that
was later made available to Inslaw, that meeting took place in September 1981,
before the consolidation of the Contra-support apparatus. It was attended by two
Contra generals, representatives from the Cabazon tribal government, and the
president of the weapons company Armtech. Also in attendance were Earl Brian
and Wayne Reeder. According to the report, the pair “arrived together in a 1981
White Rolls Royce, License Plate 2XG2302.”22

The connection between Brian and Reeder is Brian’s second connection,
following his relationship with Tessler, to the world of savings and loans. Reeder
was a prolific borrower from Silverado Savings. For instance, later, when the thrift
was near collapse, one of Reeder’s companies defaulted on a $14 million loan. He
was also affliated with Herman Bee-be, the king of bad S & Ls that had a long list
of mob and intelligence ties stretching back to the 1960s, if not earlier. A 1985
report by the Comptroller of the Currency on Beebe’s banking and insurance
empire listed San Jacinto Savings — a key node in the S & L “daisy chain” that
involved the Gouletas, M.D.C., Lincoln, and Silverado — as an institution under
his control. Beebe’s pernicious influence could also be felt at the parent
company, Southmark. “The company’s 1985 10-L showed that Herman Beebe
held nearly 62% of Southmark’s Series E Preferred Stock.”2®

To return briefly for a moment to Tessler, in 1987 he joined the board of
Leslie Wexner’s company The Limited.” This is the same year that Epstein
officially entered Wexner’s inner circle by becoming his financial advisor and the

same year that he began sharing an office with Evangeline Gouletas. Tessler
remained at The Limited for some time, and by the mid-late 1990s, he became
chairman of the company’s finance committee. Thus, Tessler would have come
into contact with Epstein at some point — and indeed, Tessler appears in Epstein’s
contact book, with two addresses and four different phone numbers listed.
Among the numbers was Tessler’s line at Data Broadcasting Corp — an “electronic
news summary” company that had been acquired by Earl Brian's Infotechnology

in 1987.

THE GOULETAS IN NEW YORK, PART I: HUGH
CAREY’S WORLD

n 1982, just as the Gouletas’ adventures in the wild world of savings and loans

were just getting started, Evangeline Gouletas left Chicago for New York. The
reason was marriage: she had married New York governor Hugh Carey, just three
months after meeting him. Evangeline’s surname was then changed to Gouletas-
Carey and, even though the marriage wouldn't last, the name-change would. The
exact circumstances through which Hugh and Evangeline met remains unknown,
but one possibility is a mutual relationship to the law firm of Shea & Gould. Carey
himself would later be a veteran of the firm, and had long counted Shea as a close,
personal friend.” Shea’s protégé—and NYC governmental law specialist at Shea
& Gould — Kevin McGrath worked on Carey’s 1974 and 1978 gubernatorial
campaigns.2”

Carey surrounded himself with other curious individuals. One of these was
Arthur D. Emil, an attorney from Surrey & Morse — the law firm of Walter Surrey,
the OSS alumni who had helped set up the World Finance Corporation. Emil had
served as the treasurer for Friends of Governor Carey, Hugh Carey’s campaign
finance vehicle during the 1978 campaign season. In 1979, he was mentioned in a
New York Times article on the allegations that Anthony M. Scotto — head of the
International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1814 and a racketeer for the
Gambino crime family — had provided large sums to both Mario Cuomo and
Carey.*2 “Around this time,” Peter Brewton writes, “Edgar Bronfman allegedly
made a $350,000 loan to Carey to help pay off a campaign debt.”

The nexus around Governor Carey wasn’t the only place where Arthur Emil
and Edgar Bronfman could be found together. In the 1980s, both served on the
board of the Gulfstream Land & Development Corp, a major Florida real estate
concern, with Bronfman serving as chairman. In 1986, Gulfstream was
purchased by a real estate developer named Kenneth M. Good, using $250 million
he had borrowed from a variety of sources. “This included $70 million of the usual
junk bonds and $90 million from major East Coast banks and the rest from a
group of mostly Florida savings and loans”? Also telling is the man then serving
as Good's attorney: Norman Brownstein, the same lawyer who sat on the board of

Silverado, and had represented M.D.C., Edward DeBartolo, and the Gouletas’
American Invesco. After Gulfstream was acquired, Good put two new individuals
on the board. One was Brownstein, and the other was Brownstein’s fellow
Silverado director, Neil Bush, the brother of then-Vice President George H.W.
Bush.

When Silverado finally collapsed, the blame was placed on Good and one of
his business associates, Bill Walters. The pair not only “walked away from more
than $132 million in bad debts” — both were investors in JNB Exploration, an oil
company formed by Neil Bush in 1983.44 Remarkably, Bush had invested a mere
$100 into the company, while Good and Walters put in $160,000 and a bank
Walters controlled issued JNB a $1.75 million line of credit. It was two years
after this operation was up and running that Bush arrived at Silverado, with the
S&L subsequently issuing multi-million dollar loans to Good and Walters. Real
estate developments and other investments across the country were the recipients
of this money.

Were the Silverado shenanigans that ensnared Bush, Brownstein, Walters, and
Good just a case of cronyism when it came to lending practices, or was there
something else going on? The problem with suspect S&L lending during this
period is that, without having a full picture of where the money was coming from,
it becomes more difficult to see the significance of where it was going. In cases
where this full picture has been developed, it becomes clear that the flow of
money was often related to broader money laundering networks that involved
organized crime and intelligence services. Then, there was the junk bond-related
“daisy chain” that Silverado was engaged with, and that involved M.D.C., the
Gouletas, and Keating, in this same period. Money from this network could have
been siphoned out into Walters and Good's various operations.

There is a possibility that paints Silverado’s lending activities in a darker light,
and which might be relevant to the daisy chain operation as a whole. Silverado had
appeared in Operation Polar Cap, a major DEA investigation into Medellin cartel
money laundering networks in the US.3° Culminating at the end of the 1980s,
Polar Cap involved revelations around “La Mina” or “The Mine,’ a triangular
formation linking banks, jewelers, and precious metals dealers in Florida, New
York City, and Los Angeles. One informant described the objectives of “La Mina”
as:

...the exploitation of legitimate gold mines for the purposes of laundering illegitimate monies.
This involved linking up with and taking control of gold mines in Peru, Venezuela, Chile,
Uruguay, etc., of gaining access to US gold refineries and jewelry stores, and of amalgamating
money generated through legitimate gold sales with drug money to conceal its origin. Some of
the money was reinvested by the cartel to fund the operation. Laundered drug money paid for
airplanes and boats in the United States, and bought coca paste in Bolivia and Peru. Later,
accounts in Banco de Occidente and BCCI were identified by the US and the Canadian RCMP
as having been used to purchase aircraft used to ferry drugs. The RCMP also identified a
number of cartel operatives and airplane manufacturers and fixed-based operators (FBO) such

as Aviel in Colombia, Eagle Air in Memphis, and Downtown Air, in Oklahoma City32

The details of Silverado’s connection to La Mina and/or to related money
laundering operations are unknown, but there are several reasons to consider the
possibility that cartel money laundering was key to this network:

e While BCCI accounts were directly used by the cartels, other
banks in the wider BCCI network were also deployed. Among
these was Independence Bank in LA, which was owned by
BCCI frontman Ghaith Pharaon.3 Pharaon also owned an
S&L in Florida called CenTrust, which did extensive business
with both Keating and Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert.*2

e Neil Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, was close to a major Florida
GOP activist and fundraiser named Leonel Martinez.
Ostensibly a prominent construction magnate, Martinez was
involved in the trafficking of cocaine and marijuana into
Florida from Colombia and elsewhere.*2 Both Martinez and
Jeb were boosters of the Contras, and Martinez was particularly
close to Eden Pastora — the same Eden Pastora who appeared at
Cabazon in the company of Earl Brian and Silverado borrower
Wayne Reeder.

e According to Cheri Seymour, the final leg of Danny Casolaro’s
investigation was into connections between his “Octopus” and
cartel money laundering, with a focus on Michael Abbell, a
high-ranking DOJ official-turned-cartel attorney. The cartel in
that case, however, was the Cali Cartel, and not the Medellin
cartel.4

One of the New York City banks utilized by Medellin’s money
laundering networks that was turned up by Polar Cap was
Republic National Bank. Robert Owen, Oliver North's primary
liaison to the Contras, utilized an officer at Republic National
Bank named Nan Morabia as a courier. The founder and
owner of Republic National was Edmond Safra, as noted in
chapter 7. According to Gordon Thomas, and as previously
noted in chapters 7 and 9, Safra was a close friend of Robert
Maxwell and allowed Maxwell-linked crime syndicates to move
money through his bank.*8 Safras name, address, and number
can also be found inside Epstein’s contact book.

THE GOULETAS IN NEW YORK, PART II: IMB
CAPITAL

n 1985, Evangeline Gouletas-Carey oversaw the relocation of Tamco’s

merchant banking subsidiary, IMB Capital, to New York City, and also became
the family member tasked with overseeing its operations. That same year, IMB
Capital, working through a front called 457 Corp, acquired Electronic Realty
Associates Inc. (ERA) from its “financially-troubled” parent company, Control
Data Corp. Part and parcel of this acquisition was a software program that had
been developed for ERA and was called Remote Mortgage Origination (RMO) -
“a computerized prequalification, origination, loan tracking, process, and
underwriting network.’*= RMO had been developed by an “affiliate” of ERA, the
Commercial Credit Mortgage Company; a perusal of newspaper archives and
other records shows that Commercial Credit often worked with various savings
and loan associations.

Control Data Corp, previously discussed in connection with PROMIS, the
World Bank and technology transfer in chapter 9, was a long time defense
contractor that was started by a team of engineers dedicated to developing code-
breaking technology. It was historically close to the Navy, and supplied this branch
of the Armed Forces with super computers. Later, in the 1960s, it began to acquire
various technology-oriented firms that were less directly connected to the national
security state. In 1976, they hired one of Edwin Wilson’s companies — possibly
Consultants International, where Robert Keith Gray served on the board — in an
advisory capacity. Notably, this would have taken place prior to the shutdown of
the Navy’s Task Force 157, where Wilson was working. In addition, Wilson
apparently bugged the offices of the Army Materiel Command on behalf of the
Control Data Corp in order to “get inside information on the Army’s bidding and
procurement plans.”4°

The address for the New York City corporate headquarters of IMB Capital
was 457 Madison Ave - the location of the Villard Houses, where Gouletas-Carey
shared an office with Jeffrey Epstein.*“ This suggests that the shared office of
Gouletas-Carey and Epstein was, in fact, also the offices of IMB Capital, thus
hinting at possible ties between Epstein and the firm.

DONALD TRUMP, THE REAL ESTATE MOGUL,
AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN, THE “PROPERTY
DEVELOPER”

he year 1987 was a pivotal year for Epstein, as it was the year he not only

became involved with Hoffenberg and the Gouletas, but also with Donald
Trump and Leslie Wexner. Both Trump and Wexner, at the time, were deeply
involved in the worlds of New York real estate, as were the Gouletas. It was during
this period that Epstein would begin branding himself a “property developer” and
become focused on real estate deals, with numerous media reports referring to
Epstein as “a property developer” well into the 2000s.48

However, it seems that Epstein’s involvement with real estate may have been a
new means of disguising his old financial tricks, as many of his real estate
transactions during this period involved the sale of the same property multiple
times, all for miniscule sums, including for as low as $1. Another property under
his control he had mysteriously obtained from the US State Department. The
specifics of Epstein’s real estate involvement were intimately interwoven into his
relationship with Leslie Wexner, whose connections and ties to organized crime
are dealt with specifically in the next two chapters.

Commercial real estate in the US has a long history of being used to launder
money, and the practice is particularly common in specific American real estate
markets, like New York City and Palm Beach, Florida. These are notably two
places where Epstein, as well as Trump, have long been active in property markets.
Trump and his inner circle, including the family of his son-in-law Jared Kushner,
have long been accused of both permitting or engaging in money laundering in
connection with their real estate interests, particularly in New York.22 Much of the
money laundering accusations that would later dog Trump during his political
career revolved around his alleged cooperation with Russian mobsters whereby
those mobsters used Trump properties to launder their ill-gotten gains.

However, while some in the mainstream press misleadingly painted this
Russian mobster-connection as meaning that Trump was “owned” by Vladimir
Putin, it is important to note that the Russian mobsters in question tied back to
Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich. As noted in Chapter 9, Mogilevich was a

major business partner of Robert Maxwell and a key fixture in the global criminal
syndicate that Maxwell had helped create at the end of the 1980s. Thus, the
connections point more to money laundering on behalf of a Maxwell-connected
criminal enterprise that encompassed Eastern European/Russian organized crime
than one necessarily tied to the current Russian government. Trump very much
appeared to exist in the Robert Maxwell orbit, having been photographed
attending parties in the late 1980s hosted by the media baron/intelligence asset on
his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine*+ His connections to such circles is also evident
given his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s “girlfriend” Ghislaine
Maxwell.

As previously mentioned, Epstein is known to have met Trump in 1987. It is
unclear exactly how the two men met, but it may have been through Epstein’s
relationship with Steve Hoffenberg, which was established that same year.
Hoffenberg would later tell the Washington Post that, during this period, “Donald’s
crowd was my crowd.”>2 He is also known to have rented a floor in Trump Tower
before his arrest.°3

In 1988, Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel, once the site of sexual blackmail
“parties” involving minors that had intimately involved Roy Cohn and were first
discussed in chapter 2. Cohn was not only Trump’s lawyer, but his mentor and
friend, and the two men regularly partied together. Cohn’s former switchboard
operator Christine Seymour claimed that, prior to Cohn’s 1986 death, Trump
called Cohn regularly, “up to five times a day% Cohn is also alleged to have aided
the judicial career of Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.>=

After purchasing the Plaza Hotel, it would be reported and confirmed by then-
attendees that Trump “used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he
owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men”
and “illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used.”=°

Andy Lucchesi, a male model who had helped organize some of these Plaza
Hotel parties for Trump, said the following when asked about the age of the
women present: “A lot of girls, 14, look 24. That’s as juicy as I can get. I never
asked how old they were; I just partook. I did partake in activities that would be
controversial, too” $7

Some authors, such as Michael Wolff, have alleged that, during the late 1980s
and early 1990s, Trump and Epstein, along with Tom Barrack, were a “set of

nightlife Musketeers” who frequently partied together.$ Barrack, founder and

CEO of Colony Capital, was also a major player in real estate and subsequently
played a key role in Trump’s later political career. During this same period, in
1990, Epstein bought a home in Palm Beach, making him Trump’s neighbor. This
suggests that — at the very least — the two men became even better acquainted after
that purchase.

Other evidence for the early partying days of Trump and Epstein later
emerged with a video recording of the two men chatting and laughing while
pointing at women during a Mar-a-Lago party held in 1992.°? It certainly appears
from the video that the two men were well acquainted. There are several other
occasions where Trump was photographed alongside Ghislaine Maxwell during
the 1990s.

There are also other allegations, such as those made by Florida businessman
George Houraney. He told the New York Times that, in 1992, he organized an
exclusive, “calendar girl” competition that was only attended by Trump and
Epstein. Houraney claims that he flew in about 28 women for the event, at
Trumps request. Houraney claimed to know Epstein “really well” and
subsequently declined to host more events involving Epstein at Trump’s request.
Some, however, have accused Houraney’s allegations as being politically
motivated and possibly inaccurate, as he had accused Trump of inappropriate
behavior toward his girlfriend and business partner shortly before the 2016
presidential election.

The relationship with Trump would continue for some time, with Trump
flying on Epstein’s plane in 1997 and the two men being photographed together at
a Victoria's Secret party that same year. A year later, Epstein had claimed to have
introduced Trump to his current wife, Melania, at an event during New York
fashion week. They would attend other parties together, including an event in
2000 hosted by media baron and convicted fraudster Conrad Black, who appears
in Epstein’s book of contacts.

Also, in 2000, Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew attended a celebrity
tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and the Prince took pictures
together.*+ Mar-a-Lago would figure prominently as a place of socialization for
Epstein and Maxwell, as well as a place where they recruited minors into their
sexual blackmail/sex trafficking operations, with the most well-known of these
being Virginia Roberts (now Virginia Giuffre). However, the Trump Organization
has claimed that Epstein was not a dues-paying member of the club. Trump is also

present in Epstein’s contact book with several numbers listed; Melania Trump is
also listed among his contacts.

In 2002 and 2003, Trump was still in Epstein’s good graces, attending several
of his dinner parties in Palm Beach as well as in Manhattan.© At one 2003 dinner
at his Upper East Side home, other attendees besides Epstein and Trump included
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Leslie Wexner, controversial British political
operative Peter Mandelson, and Bill Clinton aide Doug Band. In 2002, New York
Magazine quoted Trump as saying the following about Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff
for fifteen years. Terrific guy [ ... ] He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he
likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.
No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”®=

However, in 2004, the two men had a falling out, reportedly over their rivalry
to purchase a Palm Beach property called Maison de lAmitie that was being sold
out of bankruptcy. Trump, for his part, declined to publicly state exactly why their
friendship ended, saying that “the reason doesn’t make any difference, frankly”
and that what mattered is that the relationship had ended well over a decade
before his political career and prior to Epstein’s arrests.°° Years later, lawyer Brad
Edwards, who has represented victims of Epstein’s, said that, in 2009, Trump was
very cooperative in providing information about Epstein for the cases against
him.

Some, such as Steve Hoffenberg, have alleged that — in the early days - Trump
was not only close to Epstein, but was arguably even closer to Ghislaine
Maxwell.® After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Trump attempted to distance himself even
further from Epstein, saying he was “not a fan” of the then-jailed billionaire.
However, when Ghislaine was arrested roughly a year later, Trump publicly
offered her well wishes instead of aiming to distance himself from her as he had
with Epstein. This is despite the charges she was then facing, all of which

pertained to sex trafficking of minors in connection with Epstein.

EPSTEIN’S REAL ESTATE WEB

Å one to a Columbus, Ohio police document from the early 1990s,
umerous Wexner-linked entities, like the Wexner Investment Company,
SNJC Holdings, and PFI Leasing, shared the same office space and telephone
numbers.“ That document, part of a murder investigation detailed extensively in
the next chapter, also noted that this office was on the same floor as Wexner’s New
Albany real estate project and the offices of New Albany’s co-founder Jack Kessler.
One of the companies that shared this space was originally named Lewex and was
later renamed Parkview Financial.

Records from 1990 list Leslie Wexner as Parkview’s director and president
whereas Epstein is listed as vice president and treasurer. Records from 1987 show
that the role of vice president had previously been occupied by Harold Levin,
Wexner’s money manager before Epstein took over that role.

This specific office space shared by all of these entities was located on the 37
floor of the Huntington Center, located at 41 South High Street, Columbus, Ohio.
Beginning in 1982, the Huntington Center was largely controlled by the business
interests of Gerald D. Hines, a Houston-based real estate developer and chairman
of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 1981 to 1983. Hines’s other notable
real estate projects include Houston's Galleria, which was discussed in chapter 7 as
money from the Marcos family was invested into that particular project and
Adnan Khashoggi, who was also involved with Marcos family finances, had
suspect real estate dealings immediately adjacent to the Galleria. Another notable
Hines project was Pennzoil Place in Houston, which leased space to the Bush
family-connected companies, Pennzoil and Zapata Petroleum.

Hines had also been an investor in Houston’s “Fantasy Island” project
alongside Walter Mischer, whose connections to George H.W. Bush were
discussed in chapter 64 There, it was also mentioned that Mischer may have
played a role in Bush's own private intelligence network and that Mischer’s son-in-
law, Robert Corson, had been connected to both American and Israeli
intelligence.

Another investor in “Fantasy Island” alongside Hines and Mischer was Joe
Russo, a close associate of both Bush and Mischer. Russo was also connected to
the suspect S & L Lamar Savings, which had alleged connections to Israeli

intelligence and Adnan Khashoggi, as noted in chapter 7. Russo, incidentally, was
also a “minority owner” of the media outlet UPI at the time that a company
controlled by Earl Brian, one of the architects of the PROMIS scandal, took
control of the outlet. Russo, on Brian’s role in acquiring UPI, told the Houston Post
“He [Brian] knows what he is doing”

It is unknown if there were any direct interactions between Hines and Wexner
aside from Wexner-controlled companies leasing office space from Hines’s
Huntington Center. However, it is interesting that many of Wexner’s business
entities, particularly those flagged by Columbus police as part of a murder
investigation, leased office space from a man whose other ventures were
enmeshed with Mischer, the Bush family, Khashoggi and other intelligence-linked
entities, particularly when one considers Epstein’s own intelligence connections
and his intimate involvement, from 1987 on, in several of these specific
companies.

Parkview Financial, following the Shapiro murder, became a key vehicle for
Wexner’s, and later Epstein’s, role in real estate, specifically in New York City.
However, Wexner’s interest in Manhattan real estate pre-dated his relationship
with Epstein, as — by 1985 — he had already acquired the Gurney House on East
74" Street for $5.8 million and was cited by New York Magazine that year as
already owning “small chunks of New York” at the time.

Once Epstein became Wexner’s financial advisor, Parkview Financial
continued to expand Wexner’s real estate holdings in the metropolis by scooping
up a condominium complex in Queens called Dara Gardens. The financing for
this purchase was arranged by Dime Savings Bank of New York - one of the
largest S & Ls in the state.”

During this time, Dime Savings was one of many savings and loans that “had
extended themselves too far, making real estate loans to questionable
borrowers.’ When the S & L crisis erupted, Dime was “left with huge losses on
some 1500 defaulted mortgages,’ but avoided collapse, largely thanks to the bank’s
top executive at the time — Richard Parsons, a lawyer and former aide to Nelson
Rockefeller.” As a lawyer, Parsons’ clients had included “members of the
Rockefeller family and Estee Lauder among others.” In 1991, Parsons was
recommended to Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, a fixture on Robert Maxwell
yacht parties with past ties to organized crime, by Laurance Rockefeller. He joined

Time Warner's board and later became the company’s CEO.“

Once Wexner’s business interests had taken over Dara Gardens, it was
revamped and financially managed by Imperial Properties, the president of which
was Myles J. Horn. A few years later, in 1994, Horn was reported to be the
owner of the company HSI Inc. and was arrested after attempting to bribe the
Trump-owned Taj Mahal casino to recover a lost contract. Horn had mistakenly
offered the bribe to an undercover police officer. This may indicate that Horn,
like some other Wexner-connected businessmen from this period (e.g. Frank
Walsh, see the next chapter), had a tendency to engage in illegal activity prior to
his 1994 arrest and at a time when he was actively involved in managing Wexner
properties.

In May 1991, Dara Partners L.P. was created, apparently to manage the
condominium complex. The filing lists Ossa Properties as the owner, with offices
at 457 Madison Avenue, the very place where Epstein and the Gouletas shared
offices. The same day that Dara Partners was created, Ossa also created 301 66"
Street East Acquisition Partners, L.P.* Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, has
been the owner of Ossa Properties for several years, and has denied that the
company had any connection to his brother whatsoever. This is despite the fact
that documentation exists listing Ossa Properties as an “affiliate” of Epstein’s
company J. Epstein & Co.

However, Ossa Properties appears to have been originally founded by
Anthony Barrett. Barrett, in 1987, had founded 301/66 Owners Corp, which
owned 301 East 66" Street and was listed as an “affiliate” of Ossa Properties.
During the time these entities were controlled by Ossa, Myles Horn and Imperial
Properties were tapped to carry out a conversion on this same property, just as
they had done with Dara Gardens.** There is a possibility that Imperial Properties
was connected to the Gouletas family, as the Gouletas had several other
companies called “Imperial” and the Gouletas also shared the office space
assigned to Ossa Properties in these filings, not only with Ossa, but with Jeffrey
Epstein.

Those apartments at 301 East 66‘ Street would play a role in Epstein’s sexual
trafficking and blackmail activities. For instance, Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime
Minister and Israeli military intelligence chief, was a frequent visitor to this
location, so much so that The Daily Beast reported that numerous residents of this
Ossa Properties-owned apartment building “had seen Barak in the building
multiple times over the last few years, and nearly half a dozen more described

running into his security detail.”®> The Daily Beast report also noted that “the
building is majority-owned by Epstein’s younger brother, Mark, and has been tied
to the financier’s alleged New York trafficking ring”®° Specifically, several
apartments in the building were “being used to house underage girls from South
America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union,” according to a former
bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein’s main procurers of underage girls, Jean
Luc Brunel.®“ The Brunel-Epstein relationship is detailed in chapter 18.

Reporting from Crain's New York has noted that the majority of the units in
the complex are not sold, but can be rented out as long as the rental period is
longer than 30 days. However, it has been alleged that many of the apartments,
and apparently those alleged to have been used to “house underage girls” from
foreign countries, were being occupied for far less than 30 days, leading to
accusations that the site was “illegally operating as a hotel” as late as 2019.88

Barak is also known to have spent the night at one of Epstein’s residences at
least once. He was also photographed leaving Epstein’s residence as recently as
2016, and has admitted to visiting Epstein’ island, which has since sported
nicknames including “Pedo Island,” “Lolita Island,’ and “Orgy Island.’ In 2004,
Barak received $2.5 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where
Epstein was a trustee as well as one of the foundation's top donors at the time. The
massive grant to Barak was officially for unspecified “consulting services” and
“research” on the foundation's behalf.®2 Barak is alleged to have met Epstein in the
1980s, though Barak himself has asserted that they met much later and were
originally introduced by Shimon Peres.

It is also worth noting that Ossa Properties former Vice President and CFO,
Jonathan Barrett, was the brother of Ossa Properties’ founder Anthony Barrett.
From 1992 to 1996, Jonathan Barrett was an asset manager for J. Epstein & Co.,
Epstein’s main company during that time, and an executive at Ossa Properties
simultaneously. His resumé states that Ossa Properties “acquired and ‘turned
around’ distressed NYC real estate”?

Jonathan Barrett has since become director of acquisitions and investments at
Luminus Management, “a hedge fund that invests in the energy and power
sectors.” He has held that position since 2003.24 Luminus is also listed as a
“declared affiliate” of LS Power, where Barrett is also a managing director. LS
Power’s CEO is Paul Segal.” His father, Mikhail Segal, had originally founded LS
Power and formerly worked for the Department of Energy in the Soviet Union

before becoming president of The Energy Systems Company (ENESCO), “a
private developer of cogeneration projects% Notably, the “first recorded public
transactions of ENESCO were alongside Pagnotti Enterprises, a firm linked to the
Bufalino crime family via founder mafia boss Louis Pagnotti.”2>

Today, LS Power is a major supplier to Elon Musk’s Tesla, while Luminus
Management was the largest shareholder in Valaris, which — in 2020 — sold $650
million in oil rigs to Musk’s SpaceX.? SpaceX plans to transform the rigs into
rocket launching platforms. As reported by Business Insider, Jeffrey Epstein had
introduced a member of his entourage to Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk, who sits on
the board of SpaceX and Tesla. The woman in question, who lived at an apartment
at 301 East 66" Street and had previously “dated” Epstein, dated Musk from 2011
to 2012 and the relationship “brought Epstein into contact with the Musk family
and its businesses” It was alleged that in 2012, Epstein had toured a SpaceX
facility, though a SpaceX attorney denied the claim six months after it was initially
reported.2° In 2019, it was reported that Epstein had confirmed rumors to
journalist James Stewart that he had been secretly advising Tesla.

Notably, a director for the related Luminus Capital Partners and the Luminus
Capital Partners Master Fund is Alex Erskine, who was also a director for Epstein’s
financial vehicle Liquid Fundings.@ Erskine is also listed as a director for
numerous Glencore subsidiaries, with Glencore being the firm founded by
Mossad asset and controversial commodity trader Marc Rich.

Yet another director for Luminus Capital Partners Master Fund and Luminus
Capital Partners as well as Luminus Energy Partners is a man named Stephen
Martin Zolnai2@ Zolnai was also a director of Forexster Limited, an electronic
foreign exchange platform operating from Bermuda that claimed it “would
revolutionize the market, taking banks out of forex trades and enabling clients to
deal directly with each other?

Notably, Forexster was co-founded by the Bosnian-born Arman Glodjo who
gained a reputation as a highly skilled systems designer working for oil trader John
Deuss.1°2 As mentioned in chapter 6, John Deuss was a major employer of Ted
Shackley and his “private CIA.” In addition, a director of Deuss’s Transworld Oil,
Hugh Edwin Gillespie, was also a director of Epstein’s Liquid Funding alongside
Alex Erskine, Bear Stearns principals, and Epstein himself. As will be noted in

chapter 16, one of Epstein’s many 1990s “girlfriends” that also lived in the 301 66"

Street apartments, Francis Jardine, would end up marrying John Deuss. Epstein
took Jardine with him to at least one of his visits to the Clinton White House.

This makes Forexster’s connections to Bear Stearns, Epstein’s former employer
where he later became a major client, worth noting. According to an article
published by InformationWeek:

Though the system is not yet live, Bermuda-based Forexster is about to go live with Bear Stearns’
prime brokerage customers. “We will sit on the other side of those customers and act as a
liquidity provider,’ explains [Seppo] Luskinen. The function of a prime broker is to extend
credit and clear and settle the customers’ trades.

Bear Stearns plans to “white label” the system to its clients, which include hedge funds,
commodity trading advisors, and money managers, says Luskinen. SEB will take advantage of
existing credit relationships so that it can trade with prime brokerage clients of Bear Stearns. “All
of their prime brokerage customers will deal in (Bear Stearns’) name, and our counterparty will

104

be Bear Stearns,” explains Luskinen.——

There are numerous references to Epstein’s interest and extensive involvement
in foreign currency trading throughout the media and elsewhere. He was also a
major client of Bear Stearns following his depature from the bank in the early
1980s until its collapse as part of the 2008 economic crisis. This raises the
possibility that Epstein himself not only benefitted from Bear Stearn’s “white
labeling” of Forexster, but that Epstein potentially could have been a driving force
behind the “white labeling” policy himself.

The references to Epstein and currency markets over the years are many and
some allude to Epstein having an apparent advantage over others when
conducting trades in foreign currency markets. For instance, Vicky Ward’s 2003
report on Epstein stated that he often touted “his skill at playing the currency
markets ‘with very large sums of money:”!22 Such claims can also be found in the
2002 profile on Epstein by New York Magazine, which alludes to Epstein’s frequent
calling of currency traders abroad, and quotes close Epstein associate, Danny
Hillis, formerly of the US military contractor and supercomputer firm Thinking
Machines, as saying:

We talk about currency trading — the euro, the real, the yen. He has something a physicist would
call physical intuition. He knows when to use the math and when to throw it away. If I had acted

upon all the investment advice he has been giving me over the years, I'd be calling you from my

Gulfstream right now?L06

Many journalists and others who have interviewed or met Epstein over the years
have also referenced currency trading. For instance, not long before Epstein’s 2019
arrest, journalist James Stewart went to interview Epstein in connection with
claims that Epstein had been advising Elon Musk’s Tesla and Epstein was working
on a computer. Epstein stated that he “was doing some foreign-currency
trading” 127

Perhaps the most notable mention over the years of Epstein’s connection to
foreign currency markets can be found in a letter written by Epstein’s close friend,
Lynn Forester (later Lynn Forester de Rothschild) to then-president Bill Clinton
in April 1995. In that letter, Forester wrote:

Dear Mr. President: it was a pleasure to see you recently at Senator Kennedy’s house. There was
too much to discuss and too little time. Using my fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey
Epstein and currency stabilization, I neglected to talk to you about a topic near and dear to my

heart... 208

A TALE OF TWO HOUSES

s previously mentioned, the specific house that Epstein would occupy, 9 71

Street East, was formally purchased by Nine East 71‘ Street Corp, the
address of which is listed as being the Huntington Center in Columbus, Ohio, in
1989. Crain's New York reported that records they accessed show Epstein as having
been president of Nine East 71% Street Corp and that, on the deed of the property,
it lists that corporation as no longer being the Huntington Center, but 301 66"
Street East, the apartment complex associated with Ossa Properties.1°? Elsewhere,
it was reported that Wexner had purchased the residence in 1989 for $13.2
million, even though Epstein was president of the company that became the
residence’s official owner at that time. This suggests that, contrary to mainstream
reporting, the residence had always been intended for Epstein’s use.

Indeed, after it was purchased by Nine East 71% Street Corp, Wexner appeared
to have never moved into the property despite spending over $13 million to
purchase the property and “at least” the same amount “on artwork — including
multiple works by Picasso — Art Deco furnishings, Russian antiques, rosewood
tables and doors and a gut renovation of the home?” The refurnishing effort has,
in some reports, been estimated to have cost “tens of millions.’

In addition, “security devices, including a network of cameras, were installed”
at that time of the residence’s refurbishment and the oddities of that particular
security system were described in a New York Times article from 1996.4 That
article states that “visitors [to the residence] described a bathroom reminiscent of
James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter
from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone,
both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink.”

There has been considerable speculation that these very cameras were used to
record footage that was subsequently stored on numerous hard drives and CDs
that were known to law enforcement, both in the case of Epstein’s first run-in with
the law and in the case of his 2019 arrest. It wasn’t revealed until the Ghislaine
Maxwell trial in late 2021 that these hard drives and CDs had been known to the
FBI at the time of their 2019 raid of the property. During the Maxwell trial, it was
also revealed that the FBI agents involved did not seize them and only

photographed them. This was allegedly because the hard drives and CDs were
outside the scope of their warrant.

FBI agent testimony at the Maxwell trial also revealed that, when FBI agents
did return to the residence with an appropriate warrant, the CDs and hard drives
“went missing” and the FBI requested that evidence from one of Epstein’s lawyers,
who later brought the items to the FBI’s team. However, Special Agent Kelly
Maguire noted in her testimony that “She could not confirm the content on the
returned CDs was the same as the ones that were taken, but confirmed all the
items were accounted for.” H4

Per the photographs taken at the time of the raid, hard drives were found
inside a safe forced open by the FBI and numerous large black binders were found
in a closet that contained “CDs, carefully categorized in plastic slipcovers and
thumbnails with photos on them.’ When shown in court, the “homemade labels”
were redacted, as Judge Alison Nathan had ruled that they contained “identifying
information for third parties” + Did that information involve only the names of
underage girls, the names of blackmail victims, or both?

Numerous high-profile Epstein victims, as well as former Epstein employees,
have alluded to the videos and to blackmail, stating that Epstein had “a lot of
information on people, a lot of blackmail videos” HÉ Others have stated that the
cameras were intended to record “private moments” as they were located, among
other places, in bedrooms and bathrooms.” Court documents have also revealed
claims from different victims that other residences occupied by Epstein, including
his private island and Palm Beach mansion, were “wired up” in the same way as his
Manhattan residence on East 71* Street.148 As previously noted in this book, such
surveillance outfits in private homes had been used by the intelligence-linked
pedophile Craig Spence (see chapter 10) as well as in the Manhattan home of
organized crime-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel (see chapter 2) for the
purposes of blackmail. The blackmail-ready home of the latter, as previously
noted, was purchased by Israeli businessman Meshulam Riklis at the same time
Riklis took over Rosenstiel’s main business interests.

Also interesting is the history of the adjacent property, 11 71% Street East. A
year before a Wexner/Epstein-linked entity purchased 9 71% Street East, SAM
Conversion Corp purchased the adjacent property, 11 71% Street, from Xandra
Corporation, which was associated with Nicholas Cowan, a former attorney for
the Beatles. That year, both SAM Conversion Corp and Parkview Financial

(formerly Lewex) were listed on the mortgage assignment for that property. Like
Parkview, SAM Conversion Corp’s address was listed as the Huntington Center in
Columbus, Ohio.

In 1992, SAM Conversion Corp sold that property to 11 East 71* Street Trust
for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration paid by the party of the second
part.” Epstein was listed as a vice president for SAM Conversion Corp and a
trustee of 11 East 71* Street Trust.

The property would be controlled by Epstein until 1996, when it was sold to
Comet Trust for “10 dollars and other valuable consideration,’ per official
documentation. However, Crain’s New York reported that the likely sum of the sale
of this property was around $6.2 million.

Crain's also revealed that the Comet Trust trustee involved in this sale was a
man named Guido Goldman Goldman is the son Nahum Goldman, a
prominent Zionist and founder of the World Jewish Congress, as well as its first
president.+ His leading role there overlapped with his term as president of the
World Zionist Organization, which was intimately linked to Max Fisher's revival
of the Jewish Agency. As will be detailed in the next two chapters, Fisher was one
of Leslie Wexner’s mentors.

At the time that Goldman, via the Comet Trust, purchased the home from
Epstein, the president of the World Jewish Congress was Edgar Bronfman. Crain's
noted that the Comet Trust, where Goldman was trustee, was one of three trusts
established “for the benefit of descendants of the late Minda de Gunzburg,” Edgar
Bronfman’ sister.

Minda Bronfman had married Alain de Gunzburg, who was managing
director of Bank Louis-Dreyfus, which was a merger of the Gunzburg family bank,
Louis Hirsch & Cie, as well as interests of Louis Dreyfus and the French banking
interests of the Seligman family. The Seligmans are worth mentioning because
the family’s main bank, J.W. Seligman, held accounts with the CIA-linked David
Baird foundation previously mentioned in chapter 4.‘ In addition, a prominent
member of the Seligman banking family, Hans Seligman, was involved with
Permindex and on the board of directors of their subsidiary CMC (see chapter
3)

As for the Gunzburgs, they have been reported to be relatives of the
Rothschilds and shared a mutual connection with the Rothschilds to Club
Mediterranee. The Gunzburgs were part of the “controlling” group of the

company, which had been bailed out in 1961 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild,
“who had visited a Club Med in Israel and liked it. Baron Edmond not only paid
Club Med’s debts, he acquired a 34 percent stake in the growing tour operator” 14
Another shareholder in Club Med was BCCI frontman Ghaith Pharaon and
Pharaon had used his shares in the company to secure lines of credit from
BCCIl==

Aside from Comet Trust’s connection to the Bronfman/de Gunzburgs, Guido
Goldman's role here is also worth noting for a couple other reasons. One of those
reasons is Goldman's close relationship to Henry Kissinger, which was forged
during both men’s time at Harvard and saw Goldman described as one of

3.28 Another important

Kissinger’s “closest friends” by the press in 197
connection of Goldman's is that he apparently served as the Council on Foreign
Relations liaison to the CIA.

In a March 1977 letter from Goldman to then CIA director Stanley Turner,

Goldman wrote:

As a member of the [CFR’s] Committee on Membership, I am continuing to serve as chairman
of a panel with special responsibility for locating and screening candidates under 31 to bring to
the Committee's attention. I am therefore writing to ask if you can recommend one or two

outstanding young men or women who you believe should be given possible consideration” 127

Also publicly available is a letter written to Goldman by Joe Zaring, a top CIA
officer who worked “in the Western Europe division of the agency’s Directorate of
Intelligence,’ which instructs Goldman about visiting CIA headquarters for an
Agency “conference on Western Europe” 8

At the time of the sale of 11 71 Street East, Epstein was also a member of the
CFR, which he joined in 1995 until 2009. Notably, the CFR did not eject Epstein
after his first arrest related to soliciting sex from a minor. The CFR has admitted to
such, with the Washington Post quoting CFR spokeswomen Lisa Shields as saying
that the Council “did not connect the news [of Epstein’s first conviction] with
Epsteins membership” even though they were aware of his arrest and, by
extension, its implications.““2 Epstein’s membership in the CFR was only revoked
in 2009 because of “nonpayment of dues” and had no relation whatsoever to his
indictment or conviction. +?

From 1995 to 2006, Epstein donated annually to the council at its highest
level of donors, meaning he contributed at least $25,000 to the council on a yearly

basis. Other donors at that level during that time included Leon Black, head of

Apollo Global Management, and Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily
News after Robert Maxwell, both of whom were known associates of Epstein.

Also at this tier was David Rockefeller, who appears in one of Epstein’s contact
books. Articles from the early 2000s reported “rumors” from two separate sources
that one of Epstein’s high-profile clients at the time had been Rockefeller+*+ Also
in one of Epstein’s two contact books was the Trilateral Commission, which
Rockefeller co-founded and where Epstein had also been a member.

It later emerged that Leon Black claimed to only have begun associating
himself with Epstein in part because Epstein had been personally appointed by
David Rockefeller to the board of Rockefeller University. According to the
university, Epstein was on the board of the university for three years in the
1990s.132 However, Vicky Ward reported in 2003 that Epstein had been appointed
to the board in 2000.1%* As previously mentioned, the Rockefeller-connected
Dime Savings Bank had financed some of Epstein’s first forays into New York real
estate via Wexner-linked business entities.

RENTING A THIRD MANHATTAN MANSION

hile the two houses on East 71* Street are of great interest to the Epstein

case, it is worth noting where Epstein appears to have been living before he
began occupying that residence around 1995 or so. Beginning in 1992, Epstein
was renting a mansion on East 69" Street that had previously been the residence
of the Iranian consul general.+3$ The property, described as a “small castle” and as
“palatial” in reports, had been seized by the US government in 1980. It was
specifically the State Department, under president George H.W. Bush, that began
leasing that property to Epstein for $15,000 a month and Epstein, per reports,
“had moved out” by January 1996.

However, Epstein continued to lease the building from the State Department
well through 1997, but had begun subletting the residence in May 1996 to “high-
profile attorney Ivan Fisher,’ who is best known for having “vigorously
represented notorious crime figures over four decades” #36 Some of those “crime
figures” were represented by Fisher in the French Connection and Pizza
Connection narcotics cases and a 2013 report in the New York Times noted that
Fisher, early on in his legal career, had “developed a reputation for representing
clients in federal narcotics cases.”432

Epstein was charging Fisher $20,000 a month in rent, pocketing $5,000 for
himself — a cozy arrangement which he did not clear with the State Department
beforehand. However, Epstein had allegedly told Fisher that “the State
Department had signed off on the deal”!8 The State Department then sued
Epstein and Fisher in November 1996 and, roughly a year later, Fisher was taken
to court with the US Attorney’s office saying he owed “a year’s worth of $15,000-a-
month rent for his uptown palace” +32

However, around November 1996, Fisher had offered repeatedly to pay the
government directly to continue renting the property, which was repeatedly
declined. Per reports, the State Department was mainly upset that “Epstein hadn't
gotten permission to sublet” and would have been fine continuing to rent to him,
ostensibly just “a financial adviser,” but would not rent to a high-profile lawyer“?
This suggests that the State Department, in 1992, may have leased to Epstein for
other reasons beyond just seeking a financially well-off tenant. Why Epstein would

rent the property is also a mystery, as he owned two other (and neighboring)

palatial residences on East 71* Street at the time, only one of which was known to
be undergoing renovations during part of this period. Another relevant question:
was this residence under Epstein’s care also fitted with an extensive camera
network, as some of the properties under his control were?

This situation raises a still more obvious and important question: why did the
State Department rent to Epstein in the first place? It appears the answer was
Secretary of State from 1989 to 1992, James Baker III. According to Yahoo! News,
the lawsuit brought against Epstein (and Fisher) by the State Department suggests
that Epstein had a relationship with Baker. Epstein’s lawyer Jeffery Schantz was
asked, “Do you know how Mr. Epstein came to know Secretary of State James
Baker?” to which he responded ‘No:”?+ The answer to this question may be
related to a close friend of Baker’s Raymond Hill, who owned Mainland Savings in
Houston, the S & L mentioned in chapter 7 that was tied to Adnan Khashoggi,
also a client of Epstein’s. Hill was also connected to Walter Mischer and his son-
in-law Robert Corson, who — as noted in chapter 6 — was allegedly tied to Israeli
and American intelligence. According to an interview with Pete Brewton, James
Baker's former law firm, Andrews & Kurth, helped suppress investigations into

Mainland Savings.144

Endnotes

10
11

Roy Rowan, “Condomania’s First Family,” Fortune, August 10, 1981.

Rowan, “Condomania.’”

Rowan, “Condomania.’ See also Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.I. Books,
Dec. 1992), 231. Brewton notes that at this time, “The Los Angeles Mafia crime family was
under the dominion of the Chicago family”.

David Elsner, “Grave Dancer’ Calls the Tune,’ Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1986; Brewton, The
Mafia, 245. On Kanter, Helliwell and Castle Bank, see Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise:
Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas (Routledge, 1991).

Robert L. Jackson, “Four Charged in Bahamanian Tax Scheme,’ Los Angeles Times, March 5,
1976.

Pamela A. Holley, “What’s in Imperial Corp’s Future? Maybe Liquidation,” Fresno Bee, August
27, 1980.

Brewton, The Mafia, 241.

Brewton, The Mafia, 243.

Brewton, The Mafia, 244-45. Brewton elaborates: “When questioned about the relationship
between Mizel and Kanter, Mizel spokesman Bill Kostka said that Kanter’s law firm prepared
wills for the Mizel family in the 1970s. However, one of Kanter’s law partners at the time said
the firm's primary business was the formation of trusts, particularly offshore trusts, and that
the preparation of wills would have been incidental to that”.

Brewton, The Mafia, 243.

Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association, Hearing Before the House Committee on
Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Part |, One Hundred First Congress, Second Session, May
22-23, 1990, p. 185,

FAQAAMAAS. On Southmark as a ‘vulture, see Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo,
Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans, 1st HarperPerennial ed (New York, NY:
HarperPerennial, 1991), 246-48, https://archive.org/details/insidejoblootingQ000pizz.
House Committee, Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association, 185.

Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, Inside Job, 248.

Brewton, The Mafia, 244.

Brewton, The Mafia, 246-47.

Victor L. Simpson, “Vatican Names Laymen to Manage Scandal-Tainted Bank,’ Associated
Press, June 20, 1989, https://apnews.com/article/e63ff88d19e9d072cccc318aleedb3e4.
Doug Henwood, “Capital Cities/ABC: No. 2, and Trying Harder,” FAIR, March 1, 1990,
https://fair.org/extra/capital-citiesabc/.

“Casey Stake in Capital Cities,” New York Times, March 27, 1985,

Eric Pooley, “The Firm: The Inside Story of How One of the City’s Richest and Most Powerful
Firms Beat Itself to Death,’ New York Magazine, February 24, 1994, 22.

20

21

22

23

24

25
26

27
28
29

30

31
32

33

Mariann Caprino, “Infotech May Sell Businesses; Confirms SEC Investigation,” Associated
Press, October 24, 1990, https://apnews.com/article/ac4612e353a3c0e8202957968bb52392.

Nicholas J. Bua, “Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney of the United
States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.” March 1993,
https://archive.org/details/Inslaw-PROMISBuaReport.

Elliot Richardson, “Addendum to Inslaw’s Analysis and Rebuttal of the Bua Report:
Memorandum in Response to the March 1993 Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua,’
February 14, 1994,

Memo reprinted in Cheri Seymour, The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation Into the
Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal, 1st ed (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2010), 491-91. In
1981, Tessler sat on the board of Jackpot Enterprises, which managed slots and other
gambling machines for truck stops and small casinos. It would be interesting to know if
Jackpot was doing any business with the Cabazon’s casino project.

Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo cite Dale Anderson, Beebe’s right-hand man, as saying that the two
“tried to do several deals together.’ Both maintained property at La Costa in California, a
hangout for mob types that had been built with a sizable Teamster pension loan fund. See
Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job, 253. Burton Kanter, linked to the Chicago real estate
scene and to Helliwell’s Castle Bank in the Bahamas, had been La Costa's agent at its
incorporation. See Gene Ayers and Jeff Morgan, “Pension Fund Loans Buy Luxury,’ Oakland
Tribune, September 23, 1969.

Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, Inside Job, 401.

Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, Inside Job, 247. Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo also note that “Southmark
conducted nearly $90 million in business deals with Beebe.”

“Diversification puts limits on success,’ Akron Beacon Journal, January 19, 1995.

“Bad Management’ Topples a Firm,’ ABA Journal, May, 1994.

Guide to Law Firms (Am-Law Publishing Corporation, 1981), 709.

Arnold H. Lubasch, “$75,000 Cash Was Given to Help Carey and Cuomo, Scotto Testifies,’ The
New York Times, October 31, 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/3 1/archives/75000-
cash-was-given-to-help-carey-and-cuomo-scotto-testifies.html; Brewton, The Mafia, 266.
Lubasch notes that “Scotto lives in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section, which Mr. Carey
represented in Congress for many years.’

Brewton, The Mafia, 266.

Brewton, The Mafia, 265; Gulfstream Land & Development Corp, “Annual Report,’ 1980,
1980.html. Other directors included Herbert J. Bachelor, a managing director at Drexel
Burnham Lambert and Joseph L. Mailman, chairman of the board of Air Express
International Corporation. In 1985, Air Express was identified among a group of companies
that was paying racketeers from the Lucchese crime family to avoid labor issues. The
racketeering had been going on since around 1978. Joseph P. Fried, “11 Indicted in New
York Case,’ New York Times, February 22, 1985,

Brewton, The Mafia, 265.

34

35

36
37

38
39

40
41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

Martin Tolchin, “2 Debtors’ Role in Silverado’s Fall,” New York Times, September 24, 1990,
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/24/business/2-debtors-role-in-silverado-s-fall.html.
Stephen Pizzo, “Loose Change,’ Mother Jones, March-April 1992, 20-21,
https://books.google.com/books?id=O-cDAAAAMBAJ.

Brewton, The Mafia, 385.

Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail (Harper Business, 1992), 112-
113.

Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 76.

Floyd Norris, “CenTrust, Keating linked to Drexel,’ Tampa Bay Times, November 19, 1990,
Jefferson Morley, “See No Evil,” SPIN, March 1991.

According to Cheri Seymour, the final leg of Danny Casolaro’s investigation was into
connections between his “Octopus” and cartel money laundering, with a focus on Michael
Abbell, a high-ranking DoJ official-turned-cartel attorney. The cartel in that case, however,
was the Cali Cartel, and not the Medellin cartel. Seymour, The Last Circle, 211-214. See also
“Ex-prosecutor turned drug cartel lawyer gets prison,’ Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1999,

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul, 1st Carroll & Graf ed (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 50, 239,

“ERA Firm Sold by Control Data,’ Newsday, November 30, 1985.

Janet Reilley Hewitt, Computerized Loan Origination Networks and Traditional Mortgage
Lenders (Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 1986), 25.

Jack Anderson, “Did Terpil and Wilson bug Army for Control Data Corp?’ Washington Merry-
Go-Round, October 14, 1981.

Supplement to Who's Who in America, 1987-1988, Vol. 44 (Wilmette, IIl.: Marquis Who’s Who,
1987), 345.

Some examples of older articles that introduce and describe Epstein as a property
developer include: Michael Robotham, “The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell's Secret Love;
Revealed: The Unlikely Romance Between a Business Spy and the Crooked Financier’s
Favourite Daughter,’ Mail on Sunday (London), November 15, 1992,

sydney-morning-herald/; “Andy’s pal worries Palace,’ Sunday Mail (Australia), April 23, 2000;
William Cash, “The sins of the father,’ Evening Standard, November 21, 2003.

“Money Laundering in the Commercial Real Estate Industry,’ Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network, December 2006, https://www.fincen.gov/money-laundering-commercial-real-
estate-industry; Sean McGoey, “A Kleptocrat’s Dream’: US Real Estate a Safe Haven for
Billions in Dirty Money, Report Says,’ ICU, August 10, 2021,
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocrats-dream-us-real-estate-a-safe-

Scrutiny to Combat Money Laundering on Residential Real Estate in Miami-Dade and Palm

50

51

52

53

54

55
56

57
58

59

60

Beach Counties Attorneys,” Berger Singerman LLP, August 28, 2017,
money-laundering-on-residential-real-estate-in-miami-dade-and-palm-beach-counties;
Staff Writer, “Palm Beach County Added to List of Regions Scrutinized for Money
Laundering,’ Palm Beach Post, July 27, 2016,

to/6894745007/.
Philip Bump, “Analysis | How Money Laundering Works in Real Estate,’ Washington Post,

money-laundering-works-in-real-estate/; Craig Unger, “Trump's Russian Laundromat,” The
New Republic, July 13, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-
Thomas Frank, “SECRET MONEY: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown
Buyers,’ BuzzFeed News, January 12, 2018,
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/thomasfrank/secret-money-how-trump-made-
millions-selling-condos-to,

“On Their Toes,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 17, 1989, sec. 7w,
Marc Fisher and Jonathan O'Connell, “Final Evasion: For 30 Years, Prosecutors and Victims
Tried to Hold Jeffrey Epstein to Account. At Every Turn, He Slipped Away., Washington Post,

away/2019/08/10/30bc947a-bb8a-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html.
Jacob Bernstein, “Trump Tower, a Home for Celebrities and Charlatans,’ New York Times,

residents.html.
Marcus Baram, “Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump,’ The New Yorker, April 14,

donald-trump.

Baram, “Eavesdropping.”

Daniel Halper, “Trump Partied with Teen Girls at Cocaine-Fueled Romp in ‘90s: Report,’ New
at-the-plaza-hotel-in-the-90s-report/; Michael Gross, “Inside Donald Trump's One-Stop
Parties: Attendees Recall Cocaine and Very Young Models,” The Daily Beast, October 25,
2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/24/inside-donald-trump-s-one-

Gross, “Trump’s One-Stop Parties.”

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, ePub (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 2018), 41.

“NBC Archive Footage Shows Trump Partying with Jeffrey Epstein in 1992,’ CNBC, August 12,
2019, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/07/25/nbc-archive-footage-shows-trump-

Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, “Jeffrey Epstein Was a ‘Terrific Guy, Donald Trump Once
Said. Now He's ‘Not a Fan’ New York Times, July 10, 2019,

61

62
63

64

65

66
67
68
69

70

71
72
73
74

75
76
77

78

79

Beth Reinhard, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Marc Fisher, “Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein
Partied Together. Then an Oceanfront Palm Beach Mansion Came between Them,’

between-them/2019/07/31/79f1d98c-aca0-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html.

Reinhard, Helderman, and Fisher, “Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.’

Ken Silverstein, “The Salacious Ammo Even Donald Trump Won't Use in a Fight Against
Hillary Clinton,’ Vice, January 29, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/j59vm8/the-
salacious-ammo-even-donald-trump-wont-use-in-a-fight-against-hillary-clinton-bill-clinton.
Sarah Bernard and Deborah Schoeneman, “The Dish on Dinner,’ New York Magazine, April

Reinhard, Helderman, and Fisher, “Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.’

Silverstein, “Salacious Ammo.”

Reinhard, Helderman, and Fisher, “Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.’

Morgan Phillips, “Trump Comments on Ghislaine Maxwell Arrest, Says ‘I Wish Her Well?” Fox

her-well.

Bob Fitrakis, “The Shapiro Murder File,” Free Press, June 16, 2019,

Joseph Nocera, “Fantasy Island,’ Texas Monthly, November 1983, 168.

Brewton, The Mafia, 233.

Julie Baumgold, “Bachelor Billionaire,” New York Magazine, August 5, 1985.

“Mortgage agreement between Dara Gardens Associates and Dime Saving Bank of New

York,’ May 6, 1987, https://a836-acris.nyc.gov/DS/DocumentSearch/DocumentDetail?

doc id=FT 4170003041017; “Mortgage agreement between Dara Garden Associated and

Dime Saving Bank of New York,’ February 27, 1989, https://a836-

acris.nyc.gov/DS/DocumentSearch/DocumentImageView?doc_ id=FT 4350002551435.
On the history of Dime Savings Bank and it’s status as a major New York City thrift, see

“History of Dime Savings Bank of New York, F.S.B.,’ Reference for Business,

https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/17/Dime-Savings-Bank-of-New-York-F-S-

B.html.

“History of Dime Savings Bank of New York”

“History of Dime Savings Bank of New York”

Whitney Webb, “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the

Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,’ Unlimited Hangout, August 7, 2019,

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2019/08/investigative-series/mega-group-maxwells-and-

Connections,’ Forbes, February 25, 2009, https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/24/parsons-

obama-citigroup-intelligent-investing_citigroup_slide.html.

“Dara Gardens: Apple of Forest Hills,” Daily News, July 8, 1988; “See Values in Queens coop,’

Daily News, September 30, 1988.

“N.J. bars executive for bribe charges,” The Record, December 1, 1994.

80

81

82

83

84

85

86
87
88
89

90

91

92

93
94

95
96
97

98

state-corporation/1548784.

“Final Chartered Agreement,’ (Harlem Link Charter School), Vol. 2, http://www.newyork-
charters.org/wp-content/uploads/Harlem-Link-C.S. Charter_Volume-02-of-

03 Redacted.pdf.

“301/66 Owners Corp.” NY Company Registry,

manhattan-real-estate.
Thomas L. Waite, “POSTINGS: Conversion on East 66th Multiple Choices,” New York Times,

east-66th-multiple-choices.html.

Emily Shugerman, “Israeli Politician Ehud Barak Often Crashed at Epstein Apartment
Building, Neighbors Say,’ The Daily Beast, August 5, 2019,

at-his-manhattan-apartment-neighbors-say,

Shugerman, “Ehud Barak.’

Shugerman, “Ehud Barak.’

Bredderman, “Unraveling the Web.’

Julie K. Brown, “Epstein Scandal Explodes in Israel as Ties to Former Prime Minister under
Scrutiny,’ Miami Herald, July 14, 2019,
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article232658477.html.

“Final Chartered Agreement.’

Joe Wallace, “Energy-Focused Hedge Fund Luminus Liquidates Some Assets,’ Wall Street
Journal, April 29, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-focused-hedge-fund-luminus-
liquidates-some-assets-11619707524.

Sebastian Miralles, “Letter to The Honorable LinhThu Do,’ August 23, 2021,
https://cases.stretto.com/public/X088/10396/PLEADINGS/1039608232180000000078.pdf.

On founding LS: “Mike Segal,” LS Power, https://www.|spower.com/mike-segal/; on
relationship to Paul: Jeffrey Ryser, “LS Power Acquisitions Would Boost Generating Capacity
More than 50%,’ SP Global, March 10, 2017,
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-
insights/trending/aVNsbL9bcumk7zqCAQoj0Q2.

Mirelles, “Letter to The Honorable LinhThu Do.”

Mirelles, “Letter to The Honorable LinhThu Do.”

“Jeffrey Epstein Set Elon Musk’s Brother up with a Girlfriend in Effort to Get Close to the Tesla
Founder, Sources Say,’ Business Insider, January 13, 2020,

of-tesla-founder-elon-musk-2020-1.
“Jeffrey Epstein Set Elon Musk’s Brother up.’

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103

104

105
106

107
108

109
110

111

112
113

114
115

James B. Stewart, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People," New

epstein-inter-view.html.

“Gillespie-Hugh Edwin,’ ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database,
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/80069756.

“Zolnai - Martin Stephen,’ ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database,
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/80038197.

Tessa Oakley, “Forexster Throws down Client-to-Client Patent Challenge,” Euromoney, March

to-client-patent-challenge.

Arman Glodjo as co-founder of Forexster: See Oakley, “Forexster Throws down Client-to-
Client Patent Challenge,’; On the Arman Glodjo-John Deuss connection, see Phillip Morton,
“Bermudan Company Set To ‘Revolutionize’ Online Forex Trading,’ Investors Offshore.com,

08-02-16.00.09.jpeg.

Ivy Schmerken, “Swedish Bank Signs On as Liquidity Provider to Forexster,’ Wall Street &
Technology, September 4, 2003,
https://web.archive.org/web/20121218043803/https://www.wallstreetandtech.com/electro
nic-trading/swedish-bank-signs-on-as-liquidity-provi/14701869.

Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,’ Vanity Fair, March 1, 2003,

Thomas, “International Moneyman.”

Stewart, “Dirt on Powerful People.’

Emily Shugerman and Suzi Parker, “EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein Visited Clinton White House
Multiple Times in Early '90s,’ The Daily Beast, July 24, 2019,

inearly-90,
Bredderman, “Unraveling the Web.’
Matthew Haag, “$56 Million Upper East Side Mansion Where Epstein Allegedly Abused

epstein-nyc-mansion.html.

Haag, “$56 Million Mansion,’; Christopher Mason, “Home Sweet Elsewhere,’ New York Times,
January 11, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/11/garden/home-sweet-
elsewhere.html.

Mason, “Home Sweet Elsewhere.’

Josie Ensor and Jamie Johnson, “Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein’s Safe ‘went Missing’ after FBI
Raid, Court Hears in Ghislaine Maxwell Trial,” The Telegraph, December 7, 2021,

missing-fbi-raid-court-hears/.

Ensor and Johnson, “Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein’s Safe.”

Jacob Shamsian, “FBI Agents Used a Saw to Open a Safe in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan
Mansion That Held Hard Drives and Diamonds,’ Insider, December 6, 2021,

2021-12.

116

Tg

118
119
120

121

122

123

124

125

126
127

128
129

130
131
132

133

Daniel Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Surveillance Cameras Were ‘Blackmail Scheme” Mail Online,

surveillance-cameras-blackmail-scheme-extort-powerful-friends.html.

Chris Spargo, “Jeffrey Epstein Victim Confirms Cameras Were Set up in His Bathrooms,’ Mail
Online, November 18, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7698229/Jeffrey-
Epstein-victim-confirms-pedophile-cameras-rooms-NYC-townhouse.html.

Bates, “Surveillance Cameras Were “Blackmail Scheme”

Bredderman, “Unraveling the Web.’

“Guido Goldman, 83, Established Future Minda de Gunzburg Center,’ Harvard Gazette,

estab-lished-future-minda-de-gunzberg-center/.

Peter C. Newman, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1978), 202.

Tax-exempt Foundations and Charitable Trusts: Their Impact on Our Economy: Second
Installment, House of Representatives, 88th Congress, 1963, 97-100,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tax_exempt Foundations and Charitable Tr/S5EV
dGo3joKwC.

Maurice Phillips, “The Permindex Papers lv: Freemason Georges Mantello’s Monopoly
Money,’ | Have Some Secrets For You, June 20, 2010,

John Tagliabue, “Gilbert Trigano, a Developer of Club Med, Is Dead at 80,” New York Times,
February 6, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/business/gilbert-trigano-a-
developer-of-club-med-is-dead-at-80.html.

The BCCI Affair: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International
Terrorism of the Committee on Foreign Relations, One Hundred and Second Congress, First
Session, August 1, 2, and 8, 1991, 792-793, https://books.google.com/books?
id=8DLDVLJN sUC.

Maxine Chershire, “Party for Henry,’ Sacramento Bee, May 22, 1973.

Guido Goldman, “Letter to Stansfield Turner,’ March 1, 1977,
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP051T00644R000200420001-6.pdf.
Goldman, “Letter to Stansfield Turner.’

Marc Fisher, “Council on Foreign Relations, Another Beneficiary of Epstein Largesse,
Grapples with How to Handle His Donations,’ Washington Post, September 10, 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/council-on-foreign-relations-another-
beneficiary-of-epstein-largesse-grapples-with-how-to-handle-his-
donations/2019/09/10/1d5630e2-d324-11e9-86ac--0f250cc91758 _story.html.

Fisher, “Council on Foreign Relations.”

Thomas, “International Moneyman.’

Dechert LLP, “Memorandum to Apollo Conflicts Committee Re: Investigation Of
Epstein/Black Relationship And Any Relationship Between Epstein and Apollo Global
Management, Inc.” SEC.gov, January 22, 2021, EX 99.1,
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1411494/000119312521016405/d118102dex991.
htm.

Neel V. Patel, “Jeffrey Epstein Liked Palling around with Scientists — What Do They Think

epstein-scientists-sexual-harassment.
134 Ward, “Talented Mr. Epstein.”

135 Greg B. Smith, “Legal Eagle’s Free Ride: Lawyer Pays Not a Cent for Palatial East Side Digs,’
New York Daily News, December 23, 1997; Benjamin Weiser, “Defending the Notorious, and
Now Himself,’ New York Times, January 5, 2013,

and-now-himself.html.
136 Smith, “Legal Eagle’s Free Ride,’; Weiser, “Defending the Notorious.’
137 Weiser, “Defending the Notorious.’
138 Smith, “Legal Eagle's Free Ride”
139 Smith, “Legal Eagle's Free Ride”
140 Smith, “Legal Eagle's Free Ride”

141 “Docket for United States v. Epstein, 1:96-Cv-08307," Court Listener, https://www.court-
listener.com/docket/10516885/united-states-v-epstein/; Julia La Roche, Aarthi
Swaminathan, and Calder McHugh, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Lawyers Deeply Involved in His
Business Dealings for Decades, Documents Show,’ Yahoo Finance, August 13, 2019,

164305188.html.

142 “Pete Brewton Interview,’ Texas Observer, December 25, 1992,
https://archives.texasobserver.org/issue/1992/12/25#page=15.

143 “Pete Brewton Interview.”

Leslie Wexner speaking Woodrow Wilson Award ceremony

CHAPTER 13

THE WORLD OF LESLIE WEXNER

JOINING THE CLUB

Js Wexner was born to Russian immigrants, Harry and Bella Wexner, in

1937 in Dayton, Ohio. The family later moved to Columbus, where his father
soon opened a small shop downtown that he had named after his son — “Leslie’s.”
Money was reportedly tight in the Wexner family, but not too tight, as his parents
managed to finance his education at a private high school in the wealthy
Columbus suburb of Bexley.+

Wexner later attended Ohio State University, graduating in 1959, and he
subsequently served in the Air National Guard. In school, he had wanted to
become an architect, but was pressured by his parents to study business
administration instead. He tried law school, but dropped out and instead went to
work for his parents at Leslie’s. Despite the apparent domineering nature of his
parents and in particular his mother, a young Leslie Wexner butted heads with
them over their business strategy. He felt that his parents’ decision to stock their
store with every possible type of women’s apparel was foolish, and he sought to
create a store focused on women’s sportswear, as it was the most profitable
category of clothing they sold. When his parents wouldn't budge, Les Wexner
borrowed money from his Aunt Ida and, at 26, opened the first “The Limited”
Store in 1963 at a suburban shopping center.

The Limited began with Wexner being “an unabashed imitator” and modelling
his store’s wares after the Villager brand of stores, which catered to high school
and college age girls. By 1965, he had just two store locations; yet, he somehow
caught the attention of Milton Petrie, one of the wealthiest retail barons at the
time. Petrie wanted Wexner to become his understudy for what was then a
massive salary — $75,000 a year (around $705,500 in 2022 dollars). Wexner
reportedly turned down the offer as well as a subsequent offer from Petrie to buy a
49.5% interest in The Limited for $500,000.* This was a considerable offer given
that The Limited’s total sales volume was only $400,000 at the time.

It’s unclear how Petrie learned of Wexner and why he was so interested in
joining forces with him. While Wexner was apparently not too keen on the offer,
he soon became enmeshed with other wealthy businessmen in Petrie’s inner
circle. The retail baron’s inner circle is notable as it included Alan “Ace”
Greenberg, the long-time head of Bear Stearns who later had a close relationship

with Jeffrey Epstein and gave him his first job on Wall Street; Laurence Tisch,
chairman and CEO of the Loews Corporation and later of CBS News; and
Adolph Alfred Taubman, who would go onto to become what Petrie had
unsuccessfully hoped to be to Wexner — his mentor. Per Petrie, “The main reason
Wexner and I never got together [... | is that we couldn't decide who was going to
be the top man. Personally, I'd never go along on a deal where I won't be the
boss.”2

Wexner quickly became close to A. Alfred Taubman at some point in the late
1960s, when Wexner was looking to expand his retail business beyond Ohio.
According to Wexner, the two men first met in person after he was “summoned”
by Taubman to Detroit. Wexner said the following of their first meeting:

He [Taubman] is a very big man, and he didn’t say a word to me. We had coffee and then got
into his helicopter, which was waiting out back, but he still hadn’t talked. He flew me to three
shopping centers and stopped at my stores, and then finally he turned to me and said “Do you

wonder why I called you? Your stores are a blight on my shopping centers.”=

Taubman claims that Wexner “immediately got on it” and redesigned his
stores. Taubman’s approach and Taubman’s own penchant and interest in
architecture, which was what a younger Wexner had once hoped to study,
apparently left quite the impression and blossomed into a close relationship. Not
only would Taubman take “Wexner under his wing,” he would also give “him his
first crack at prime mall space”? Years later, in 1987, Wexner would tell the New
York Times that “Alfred and I have a very intimate relationship, like father and son,”
adding that Taubman taught him “most of what he knows” about real estate and
also influencing his approach to retail to a considerable degree was well.

Soon after their introduction, Taubman would induct Wexner into his own
inner circle and Wexner would consequently develop a relationship with
Taubman’s closest partner, the similarly wealthy and politically connected Max
Fisher. Fisher and Taubman would rank top among the wealthy businessmen
mentors that Wexner later referred to as his “business ‘rabbis.”2 Both Taubman

2 (<9

and Fisher have been described as Wexner's “mentors” by different media outlets

and their influence on Wexner’s activities is significant for several reasons.22

MEET MAX FISHER

ax Fisher is Perfect Success Story,’ celebrated the 1965 headline of a

fawning UPI profile detailing the life and accomplishments of the
Detroit industrialist! Fisher, the article elaborated, had endured hard labor,
hauling 400 pound bags of ice to pay his way through college, and had made every
penny count by eating “bowl after bowl of cheap chili.” For all intents and
purposes, Fisher is presented as the perfect “rags-to-riches” American success
story.

Such hyperbolic and fawning assessments by the media weren't unusual for
Fisher, as most media accounts of Fisher, up until and following his death in 2005,
have extolled the Detroit-based businessman for his many “virtues.”

Among these virtues was Fisher's finesse with the media. Fisher's biographer
Peter Golden reported that Fisher's close friend George Romney, former governor
of Michigan and father of Mitt Romney, had praised Fisher's ability to deal with
the press: “Max has good judgment”? Fisher’s long time business associate A.
Alfred Taubman was likewise impressed with how Fisher managed the press,
“with an adroitness based on a subtle combination of his personality, skill, and
reputation.” Taubman, as quoted in the 1992 Fisher biography Quiet Diplomat,
continued:

Max is a patrician, in the best sense of the word. He is so courtly that reporters are charmed by
his taking the time to talk and seeming - when he does say something - to talk frankly with
them. Yet I wonder if they ever analyze what he tells them, how little he reveals. You won't get
any secrets from Max. He's too guarded. Also, as far as the Detroit media is concerned, Max is a
sacred cow. He’s good for Detroit, he’s a symbol of all that is progressive about the city and the

media responds to this. He is above reproach.23

More than the oil or real estate industries, Fisher had seemed to profoundly
understand how his respected public image as a clever businessman and endlessly
generous philanthropist was the most valuable of his many assets. Yet, this
carefully constructed public image, as is so often the case, was hardly the whole
story.

For instance, Fisher’s early, humble beginnings, as often lauded by media
profiles such as the 1965 UPI piece, have an alleged darker side, with claims of
Fisher's past ties to Detroit’s Purple Gang having swirled around him for years.

While the truth of this allegation is debatable, Fisher would go on to have several
close business associates who were all too familiar with the incestuous networks
linking organized crime and intelligence networks, with Charles Bronfman,
brothers Charles and Herbert Allen of Allen & Co., and Fisher’s eventual
“protégé” Leslie Wexner being just some examples.

As soon as Fisher graduated from Ohio State University, he went into the oil
business, rising from his first, relatively small refining effort that produced a mere
100 barrels of crude oil a day, to being “the chief stockholder in Marathon Oil,
general chairman of the nationwide United Jewish Appeal, and one of Michigan
Governor George Romney’s chief fundraisers.’++

When questioned about his success, Fisher remained ever modest. “One of
the things that was good for us,” Fisher had told UPI, “is that I happened to be in
the right place at the right time” The 1965 article claims that, while every major
analyst had predicted a post-war contraction in the national oil industry, Fisher
dared to stick to his convictions: “We gambled every penny on the belief that the
oil business was going to expand, not contract.”!° It is remarkably similar to the
narrative once used by Lewis Rosenstiel to explain why he had hoarded liquor for
several years during the Prohibition Era — all due to a “tip” that ran counter to
common knowledge at the time. Rosenstiel had, of course, also been “in the right
place at the right time” for his chance meeting in France with Winston Churchill,
who would fortuitously offer him that “tip,” on which Rosenstiel would bet
everything and, subsequently, build an empire.

As bleak as the oil industry’s outlook may have been at the time, Fisher had
stood firm, leading his underdog company, the Aurora Gasoline Company,
through dire straits to a $39 million buyout of Aurora shares by Ohio Oil, once
part of the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, in 1959. Fisher held 38% of that
stock, amounting to $13,870,000.42 Ohio Oil would become Marathon Oil a few
years later, in 1962.

Once in his mid-50s, Fisher gradually retired from the oil industry, which he
had spent more than thirty years helping to develop. Yet, Fisher was hardly
withdrawing from public life and the pursuit of power. His exit from the industry
was, instead, a long planned move whereby Fisher would now work to cultivate
and expand his influence full-time, now that his commitments to Aurora and Ohio
had been settled.

Detroit would serve as Fisher's staging ground for the aggressive national
expansion of his own image. In Motor City, he served on the board of the Detroit
Economic Club, the Detroit Board of Commerce and the Detroit Metropolitan
Building Fund. He was also then serving as vice president of both Sinai Hospital
and the Greater Detroit Hospital Council and was also a director of the Detroit
Symphony and the Detroit Institute of Arts.18

Around the same time, Fisher increasingly turned his attention to real estate
deals and development in the city, focusing on projects favored by the New
Detroit Committee that he, Henry Ford II, and other prominent Detroit business
leaders helped create. New Detroit was billed as a “new urban coalition,” as it
included representatives of the working class and African-American community.
However, the group was nevertheless dominated, and bankrolled, by the city’s
oligarchs.+?

The committee worked to install a “new political apparatus” whereby the
oligarchs behind New Detroit would “enlist the services of radical-sounding
advocates of black power and community control, in addition to their tried and
true agents in the trade union bureaucracy and the traditional middle-class black
leaders”? This would give the outward appearance that positive change had been
made, while the forces behind New Detroit, including Fisher, would continue to
advance what some have termed “the era of regional competition?” The book
Detroit: Race and Uneven Development described this era as follows:

International economic crisis brought on by world overproduction and increasing international
competition is now spawning reorganization in the basic manufacturing industries. To maintain
profitability, industrial corporations are shifting blue-collar production work abroad and
automating it at home. They are concentrating their domestic capital on administration,
research and development, and high-value, high-technology operations. The upshot is a
corresponding reorganization of the regional economy according to a new spatial logic. [... ]
The patterns of racial inequality are related to the uneven spatial distribution of blacks and
whites in the metropolitan area. This uneven racial distribution is also related to uneven
economic development. Whites are over-represented in economically developing suburban
municipalities of Oakland County. Blacks, on the other hand, are over-represented in the central

city of Detroit and in Wayne.2+

Fisher was directly involved in a “government-subsidized downtown real
estate boom,” which “siphoned off virtually all funds from the reformist programs
promised by New Detroit in its infancy, most of which never got off the ground,
and enriched the banking and industrial establishment as well as a thin layer of

middle-class blacks”? Fisher had given the visionary impetus for one of the
flagship projects of this effort — the Detroit Renaissance Center, a lavish, $337
million development of seven interconnected skyscrapers undertaken by Henry
Ford II, the son of the automobile magnate, a close business associate of Fisher’s,
and one of the main funders of New Detroit.”

Fisher followed the Detroit Renaissance Center with other projects, like the
luxurious Riverside West, two 29-story residential towers with amenities
including “a view of the Detroit River, tennis courts atop the parking garage, a
glass-enclosed swimming pool, a 77-boat marina, a health club, a gatehouse with
private access, around-the-clock security, and a downtown People Mover stop
near the front door”?

In these urban development efforts, Fisher was frequently joined by A. Alfred
Taubman. These included the Irving Ranch, the Somerset Mall Apartments in
Troy, and the Somerset Inn. Several of these projects also involved Henry Ford II.
Taubman and Fisher had first become associates during the 1950s, when
Taubman was hired by Aurora Gasoline Company to handle construction of the
company’s expanding network of Speedway service stations. At the time,
Taubman was just a “struggling builder” based in Pontiac, Michigan, and his
business with Fisher placed him on the road to financial success. Taubman would
then become a builder of small stores before becoming “the nation’s preeminent
developer of giant regional malls.”

Fisher used his carefully crafted public image and business acumen to help sell
his real estate projects as fantastic and grand undertakings, not just for Fisher and
other members of the city’s elite, but for the city as a whole. His seemingly
effortless ability to direct the sentiments and attention of the pliant local media
wherever and however he chose allowed him to use these projects and the positive
press they generated to carefully conceal the cannibalization of American blue-
collar industry by himself and his many business associates. His deftness with the
press helped turn media attention away from the destruction of the city’s
industrial base and towards the magnificent residential towers and luxurious
riverside apartments that made him, Taubman, and others incredibly wealthy.

However, Fisher’s influence extended far beyond his native Detroit. Fisher was
a long-time supporter of the Republican Party, and was an intimate of presidents
Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. He repeatedly offered his services as a diplomatic
liaison between America’s foreign policy leadership and the State of Israel. In this

capacity, more often than not, Fisher lobbied hard, and often successfully, for
Israeli policy goals and specifically military aid.

Fisher has been described, for instance, as the driving force behind the Nixon
administrations airlift of US weapons to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In
another example from that period, in 1975, Fisher provided his services to the
Ford Administration in spearheading a reconciliation between American and
Israeli leaders following the US government's flirtation with the possibility of
rolling back military assistance to Israel.

Sallai Meridor, an Israeli politician then serving as chairman of the Jewish
Agency, would later refer to Fisher as “the prime mover in canvassing support for
Israel during the wars of ’67 and ’73” as well as “the most prominent leadership
figure in mobilizing identification with and support for the State of Israel in world
Jewry, and the United States, in particular” ~

Fisher also, apparently, played a leadership role in his close-knit networks of
wealthy business associates. In 1990, Fortune magazine wrote that Fisher,
described in the article as a “long time Republican powerbroker and big
fundraiser for Jewish causes,’ was the “nexus” (i.e. the center) of the nation’s
“oldest of the old boys’ networks,” the most prominent members of which were
Taubman, Henry Ford II, and Leslie Wexner.

FROM UNITED BRANDS TO THE UNITED
JEWISH APPEAL

hat same year, 1975, Fisher became the chairman of United Brands,

previously known as United Fruit, and Alfred Taubman would later join him
there as a company director. As previously mentioned in earlier chapters, United
Brands had a long history of CIA connections, from the CIA’s 1954 intervention
that overthrew Guatemalas government on behalf of United Brands to the
company’s lending of two freighters to the CIA’s unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba in 1961.72 United Brands had also been represented for years by the law
firm Sullivan & Cromwell, once run by the Dulles brothers, and was previously
headed by J. Peter Grace, who would later be intimately involved in AmeriCares,
Covenant House, and the Knights of Malta (see Chapter 10) as well as Samuel
Zemurray, who had helped smuggle arms to Zionist paramilitary organizations
after World War II (see Chapter 3).

Fisher became chairman of United Brands the year that Eli Black, the
corporate raider who took control of the company in 1968, fell to his death from
the 44" floor of the Pan Am building in Manhattan. He was reportedly “under
great strain because of business pressures” at the time and his death was ruled a
suicide. Black’s son, Leon, would also become a corporate raider like his father,
later founding Apollo Global Management and becoming a close associate of
Jeffrey Epstein, who would play a major role at Leon Black’s “philanthropic”
family foundation.*+

Fisher would later step down from his position as chairman of United Brands,
in 1978, turning the reins over to his close friend Seymour Milstein. He continued
to maintain a position on the board of directors, however, as well as a significant
interest in the company.

While Fisher was still chair of United Brands, in 1977, a consortium
consisting of Fisher, Alfred Taubman, Henry Ford II, Charles and Herbert Allen
of Allen &Co., and several other industrialists, real estate giants, and businessmen
took control of the famed Irvine Ranch in Orange County, California22 Among
these additional partners was Howard Marguleas, who sat on the board of United
Brands, alongside Fisher and Taubman.*4 Having outbid Mobil Oil for the

property, these individuals became the principals in a new corporation established
to control the ranch, the Irvine Company.

According to Taubman, the Irvine plan had originated with Charles Allen,
who approached him with the idea in 1976. Originally, the entity had been
conceived as a straightforward Allen-Taubman partnership. However, when Mobil
Oil expressed interest in acquiring the property, Taubman and Allen saw an
opportunity to cast a wider net in their search for partners. “The first person I
called,” Taubman writes, “was Max Fisher, my dear friend from Detroit whose
financial resources were matched by his extraordinary business judgment. My next
calls were to other close friends: Henry Ford II ... and Howard Marguleas.”*4

Taubman and Allen had first become acquainted in the 1950s, when they were
introduced to one another by Vincent Peters, generally known as “Jimmy” Peters,
who was vice president of the New York City brokerage firm Cushman &
Wakefield, Inc.™% The three men joined forces with real estate tycoon Arthur
Rubloff to launch Bayside Properties, which was created to manage a series of
West Coast shopping centers they jointly owned.3£

Both Charles Allen and his brother, Herbert Allen, had long maintained
connections to organized crime and intelligence services —- the most notable
example being their involvement in the companies that dominated Freeport, the
largest city on the island of Grand Bahama. Charles Allen, along with the
aforementioned Arthur Rubloff, were both among the initial investors in the
Grand Bahamas Development Company (DEVCO), which had been formed by
Meyer Lansky frontman Louis Chesler.*2 According to Dan Moldea, Chesler
himself had first been recruited by Allen into the Bahamian business: “Chesler’s
attorney, Morris Mac Schwebel, told me ‘Allen originally brought the Bahamas
deal to Chesler, who became fascinated by the islands: ”38

Allen had also helped arrange Chesler’s ouster from DEVCO, which saw him
replaced by the Miami businessman Max Orovitz.?? Orovitz was also closely tied
to Lansky interests, having previously served on the board of Chesler’s General
Development Company and later maintaining a position at Major Realty. Both of
these were Florida real estate concerns that have been linked to Syndicate money
laundering. Major Realty would later become enmeshed in the business empire of
an organized crime-linked associate of Leslie Wexner’s, Edward DeBartolo.

In 1983, Fisher, Taubman, and Henry Ford II sold their stakes in the Irvine
Company, which coincided with their efforts to acquire Sotheby’s, the esteemed

auction house founded in London in 1744. In pursuing this acquisition, the
Fisher-Taubman-Ford group formally added a new partner to their business circle
— Leslie Wexner. Wexner, as previously mentioned, had been associated with
members of this set for at least a decade, and had first become well acquainted
with Taubman in the late 1960s.*2

That year, Taubman and company would come together to “save” Sotheby’s,
along with a group of investors that included Ann Getty, Milton Petrie, and Leslie
Wexner.*! They paid $139 million for the auction house, $70 million of which was
loaned to the group by Chase Manhattan bank.42 Some press reports stated that
“Henry Ford II was rumored, though never proven, to have greased the wheels by
putting a good word in with Queen Elizabeth II.”48

In 1983, the New York Times reported that Taubman’s original group of
investors that aimed to take over Sotheby’s had not included Wexner, but had
instead included Max Fisher, Henry Ford IJ, and a man named David H.
Murdock. These men were reported as being the central group looking to take
over Sotheby’s.4
Occidental Petroleum, led by Murdock’s close friend Armand Hammer.*® His
involvement in the Taubman-Fisher network is significant for other reasons, even

Murdock was notably one of the largest shareholders in

though he ended up not being part of the final deal.

At the time the Sotheby’s deal was taking place, Murdock’s investments were
managed by a man named Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur Jr., who had previously been
involved with Penn Central in the years after its 1970 bankruptcy. Winokur was
involved in launching a joint venture between David Murdock’s Pacific Holdings
Corporation and Peter Kiewet & Sons Inc., which was called the Kiewit-Murdock
Investment Corporation.*2 The purpose of this venture was to acquire the
Continental Group, Inc., where Ken Lay, best known as the infamous CEO of
Enron, would serve as president in the early 1980s.44 However, the Murdock
team-up with Peter Kiewet & Sons is significant as the corporation was identified
as one of the main companies that “poured millions into the Franklin Credit
Union,” then-managed by the child abuser, pedophile, and sex trafficker Larry
King (see chapter 10).48 Kiewet chairman Walter Scott Jr. was also on the board of
FirsTier Bank in Nebraska, which provided “cover for” the Franklin Credit Union
when it ran overdrafts.

Once Wexner and Petrie, among others, had apparently stepped in to replace
David Murdock as part of “Team Taubman,” Sotheby Parke Bernet, the parent

company of Sotheby’s, would officially become controlled by Taubman, who was
described at the time as “the ‘white knight’ that Sotheby’s hoped would win in the
takeover battle”? Taubman and his associates moved quickly to form a new
company to manage the international auction house and cement their complete
control over the famous international brand.°+

Within four years, sales at Sotheby's were booming and the Taubman takeover
was seen as a success. Part of this was due to Taubman’s policy of “offering good
customers financing for up to half the most conservative estimate of the value of
Sotheby’s art”? Sotheby’s was led during this period and until 1994 by Michael
Ainslie. In 1994, Ainslie would become a director at Lehman Brothers, and he
served in that capacity until the bank’s bankruptcy in 2008.*4

The late 1980s saw a boom at the auction house with the firm selling
impressionist and modern art for over $1.1 billion in both New York and London.
By the close of the decade, prices had risen to ridiculous levels and its auctions
attracted global media attention. In 1988, the company went public for the second
time. The global recession at the beginning of the 1990s had little effect on the
auction house’s business and Sotheby’s would continue to grow considerably
throughout the rest of the decade.

However, the recession of the early 1990s had negatively impacted Taubman’s
larger business empire and he began engaging in suspect business methods to
make more money through Sotheby’s. In 2000, government prosecutors began
investigating whether, in 1995 and perhaps earlier, Sotheby’s had conspired with
its rival auction house, Christie’s, to split business and fix commissions.*+
Documents subsequently presented in court showed that Sir Anthony Tennant,
the former chairman of Christie's auction house, turned up in the date-books and
appointment schedules of Taubman at least a dozen times between 1993 to
1996.°>

Once the price fixing between Sotheby's and Christies was discovered,
Taubman and the chief executive of Sotheby's during this time, Diana D. Brooks,
were investigated by the FBI and subsequently prosecuted. The prosecution
offered leniency to the first conspirator in the case to confess and Christie's
quickly confessed and acknowledged its role in the situation, sealing Taubman’s
fate.

Taubman ended up serving time at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester,

Minnesota, and he was prohibited from conducting business from prison.°° Diana

Brooks was also found guilty for her own admitted role in the scheme, but was
spared prison time and instead was sentenced to three years of probation,
including six months of house arrest.24 At the Taubman trial, Taubman’s lawyer
presented dozens of letters written on Taubman’s behalf. One of those letters was
written by Leslie Wexner, where he called Taubman “the best person I know”58

In the lead up to Taubman’ arrest, Ghislaine Maxwell was a regular visitor to
both Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses. The Daily Mail stated in an August
2020 article that Maxwell “trawled high-end art galleries and auction houses for
pretty ‘gallerinas’ to meet Jeffrey Epstein.” The article goes on to state that “Ms.
Maxwell regularly attended events at Christie’s and Sotheby’s on both sides of the
Atlantic.’ It quotes an anonymous, former friend of Maxwell’s as saying:

She [Maxwell] would go to every art gallery opening and was a familiar presence at auctions and
parties at Christie's and Sotheby’s, [... ] The art world is full of pretty young girls and many of

them are young and broke. You'd see her everywhere, often with beautiful blonde girls in tow.22

It is worth explicitly noting that Maxwell engaged in these activities on
Epstein’s behalf while Wexner, Epstein’s principal benefactor, was on the Sotheby’s
board and while his close friend, Taubman, controlled the auction house.
Ghislaine’s role in recruiting “gallerinas” and other young women and girls for
Jeffrey Epstein and their sex trafficking operation is discussed in detail in chapter
18.

A year after the acquisition of Sotheby’s, in 1984, Fisher relinquished his
remaining United Brands stock by selling it to Carl Lindner Jr., the secretive
Cincinnati businessman behind American Financial Corporation. These shares,
along with those of Seymour Milstein, allowed Lindner to take control of United
Brands in February 1984. The company has since become Chiquita Brands
International.

A month later, Oliver North would record in his notebook that United Brands
had issued a grant to the National Defense Council Foundation — founded and
run by NSC staffer and low-intensity warfare expert F. Andrew Messing — “for the
study of Mexican political center [sic]”°4 Like Messing himself, principals of the
National Defense Council Foundation were closely tied to the Iran-Contra affair.
For instance, one of the directors was John K. Singlaub, who worked closely with
both the Contras and American mercenaries involved with the Contras. Singlaub’s
Contra activities and his role at GeoMiliTech were mentioned in Chapter 7.

Another figure at the National Defense Council Foundation was J. Herbert
Humphreys, a Memphis businessman and financier of Civilian Material
Assistance, a paramilitary unit deployed to Honduras to aid the Contras.

This was one of two mentions related to Carl Lindner Jr. found in North's
notebook in March 1984. The second was a reference to a meeting held at the
Ocean Reef Club — a Florida luxury hang-out owned by Lindner. As previously
noted in Chapter 7, the Ocean Reef also played a role in the cocaine smuggling
activities of Jack Raymond DeVoe. As one 1985 news report recounted: “...the
cocaine was taken to the Bahamas in large airplanes. The cocaine was hidden
inside the wings of smaller planes that landed at south Florida airports to clear
customs. The cocaine, unloaded at the posh Ocean Reef Resort in Key Largo,
totaled more than 15,000 pounds, according to the state indictment.” The bank
accounts utilized for laundering DeVoe's proceeds had been set up by Lawrence
Freeman — a veteran of Castle Bank & Trust, the infamous bank set up by CIA
banker Paul Helliwell.®

At the time that these various moves were being made, Fisher developed a
cozy relationship with President Ronald Reagan - continuing the tradition of
advising Republican presidents on Middle Eastern and Jewish matters. In 1980,
he, along with Taubman, organized a fundraiser dinner for Reagan — with tickets
priced at $1,000 each.

During the Reagan years, i.e. the 1980s, Fisher also became a member of the
board of overseers of the B'nai B'rith International, where he served alongside
Edgar Bronfman and the notorious banker Edmond Safra. It was during this same
period that Safra’s bank, Republic National, became embroiled in the financial
activities of the Iran-Contra network and with BCCI (see Chapter 7).

Also in the 1980s, Fisher was instrumental in covert aliyah, or immigration to
Israel, operations that brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, specifically
Operation Moses (1984) and later Operation Solomon (1991). Fisher and
Gordon Zacks, who - like Fisher - was an accomplished businessman, ardent
Zionist, and adviser to US presidents, “provided the political fire-power for the
CIA to team up with the Mossad,” with those intelligence agencies executing
much of the operation.S2 George H.W. Bush, who counted on both Zacks and
Fisher as advisers, was also involved with Operation Moses while serving as US
Vice President and it had been Fisher who had personally involved him in the

operation.”

Roughly a decade earlier, in 1970, Fisher had recreated along with Louis
Pincus, the Jewish Agency, which had been the operative branch of the World
Zionist Organization (WZO) and had played a major role in the founding and
development of the State of Israel. Its role in the smuggling of arms to Zionist
paramilitaries in Palestine after World War II was detailed in Chapter 3. When it
was re-launched by Fisher and Pincus, its leadership was divided among the
WZO, the United Jewish Appeal and the United Israel Appeal. Fisher would hold
leadership roles at the organization for many years.

Louis Pincus was the first managing director of El Al airlines, the main airline
historically used by Israeli intelligence for covert operations, including Operation
Moses.“ Leaked cables from South African intelligence in 2015 confirmed this to
an extent, as those documents revealed that South Africa’s national intelligence
agency believed that Israel used El Al “as cover for its intelligence agencies.”
Those documents also note that “Israeli intelligence agents posed as El Al
employees” and that those employees conducted “security operations at the
airport that were illegal under South African law” After Pincus’ death in 1973,
Fisher would manage the Pincus Fund in his memory, which was largely financed
by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency.“

Notably, Leslie Wexner's father-in-law, Yehuda Koppel, after starting his career
in the British-led Jewish Brigade and transitioning into a leading role in the
Haganah, opened the first US office of El Al airlines, expanding the front
company’s presence into the United States.” It is also worth noting that Livia
Chertoff, the mother of former head of the Department of Homeland Security
Michael Chertoff, was a flight attendant for El Al and participated in Mossad
operations, like Operation Magic Carpet, while working for the airline. Michael
Chertoff later became intimately involved in an Orwellian company funded by
both Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak named Carbyne911
whose founding leadership was replete with Israeli intelligence veterans and assets
(see chapter 21).7

In addition to the Jewish Agency, Fisher would also hold major leadership
roles at the United Jewish Appeal as well as the United Israel Appeal. Both of
those organizations would play a major role in the affairs of Fisher's protégé Leslie
Wexner during the 1980s. Wexner, for instance, was “one of the largest individual
contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America” by 1986.2 The United
Jewish Appeal has since merged with United Israel Appeal, which was later

headed by Fisher’s daughter Jane Sherman.®2 By 1987, Wexner had also become
vice chairman of the United Jewish Appeal and the eventual creator of the Wexner
Foundation’s Wexner Heritage Program. Rabbi Herbert Friedman was also a
former CEO of the United Jewish Appeal. The Wexner Foundation’s creation is
discussed in the next chapter.

THE SHAPIRO MURDER

PF March 1985, a lawyer in Columbus, Ohio named Arthur Shapiro was shot

and murdered at point-blank range in broad daylight. Per police reports, he was
eating breakfast in his car with an unidentified man. Shortly after 9:30am that
morning, Shapiro sprung from his car with the unknown man also abruptly
leaving the vehicle to give chase. The man fired his handgun at Shapiro, grazing his
hip and arm before Shapiro reached a condominium and began pounding on the
door. The man, described as wearing all black and running with a limp, then shot
Shapiro twice in the head at close range before fleeing the scene in Shapiro's car.
The car was found the next morning in a mall parking lot. It had been wiped clean
of all fingerprints. The murder was regarded by police as a professional hit and one
that was likely tied to organized crime.®2

Local authorities suspected that Shapiro's murderer had been hired by
Columbus-based accountant Berry L. Kessler. Two of Kessler’s employees from
this period later alleged to the Columbus Dispatch that they had seen a man
matching the killer's description visit Kessler’s office the next day and had seen
Kessler counting a large pile of money before this man had arrived. However,
since the killer's description was mainly based on clothing alone, this would mean
the killer came to receive what is presumed to be payment for a contract killing in
the same or very similar attire in which he committed the murder a day later. This
seems unlikely given the presumed “professional” nature of the hit and hitman. It
is also not clear how long after the murder these former employees of Kessler
relayed this information to the Dispatch. A review of other Dispatch reporting on
the matter suggests that such claims were not made until the early 1990s, when
Kessler was arrested for an unrelated contract killing after the FBI got involved.

In 1991, Kessler was charged in Florida with arranging the slaying of his
business partner John Deroo. He was convicted for that crime in 1994 and died in
prison in 2005.*4 Kessler was caught in the Deroo case through the use of an FBI
informant, leading Kessler’s attorney to argue that Kessler had been “tricked by a
government informant into complicity in a criminal act% Per a Columbus
Dispatch article entitled “Informant led way in Florida arrest,’ it was only when
Kessler was charged in connection with Deroo’s slaying in 1993 that he became
the “prime suspect” in the Shapiro case, though he had previously been an initial

suspect. However, Kessler was never charged in connection with Shapiro's
murder. Police later stated that no suspect in the Shapiro murder had ever been
eliminated from their suspect list.

Kessler had been convicted, along with two co-conspirators, of helping Arthur
Shapiro file false tax returns in 1986, a year after the murder. Shapiro, shortly
before his death, had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in that tax case
and was killed a day before he was set to testify.©4

As an unindicted co-conspirator, Shapiro would not have been indicted
himself, but could have provided damaging information to those who had been
indicted during his planned testimony. This offers a potential motive for Shapiro's
murder, as it would have been in the interest of Kessler and other co-conspirators,
who are unnamed in Dispatch or other media reports of the time, to see to it that
Shapiro did not testify. Yet, what is odd about this court case, including the fact
that a key witness had been murdered in what police referred to as a “mob style
murder” or “mafia hit,’ is that Kessler and his co-conspirators were only sentenced
to probation and did not serve prison time for the charges, which were centered
around helping Shapiro file false tax returns from 1971 to 1976.88

This raises several questions. Why was Shapiro an unindicted co-conspirator if
he was the one actually filing the fraudulent tax returns, especially given that those
who were charged were charged with aiding Shapiro? Does that mean he had
planned to testify about other individuals involved in the scheme who were not
yet part of this particular case in exchange for avoiding charges? Also, why were
those convicted given such a lenient sentence, despite the high-profile murder of
the key witness? After all, the most likely motive for Shapiro's murder was to
prevent him from testifying in this specific case.

Other questions are raised by Kessler’s past history prior to the Shapiro
slaying. Kessler had previously come under suspicion after the murder of his
business partner Frank Yassenoff and his fiancée Ella Rich in 1970, but Kessler
was never charged. Both Yassenoff and Rich had been found dead in Yassenoff’s
car in his driveway. Two years later, in 1972, Kessler was taken to court by the IRS
for failing to provide records of an Ohio-based construction company, Brittany
Builders, where Kessler was secretary and thus custodian of those records.®2
Kessler was first ordered to provide those records, but that decision was later
dismissed in 1973. One of the lawyers defending Kessler in these cases, Joseph F.
Dillon of Detroit, Michigan, later represented Detroit mafia figure Anthony

Giacalone on federal tax evasion charges in 1976.22 A decade later, Dillon was also
involved in the 1986 case involving Kessler and Arthur Shapiro's filing of
fraudulent tax returns.

In 1972, the records of Brittany Builders were wanted in connection with a tax
liability investigation into Carl and Sandra Neufeld and the requested records
ranged from the years 1967 to 1969. Brittany Builders was incorporated in 1967
by Joseph L. Eisenberg, a Columbus area lawyer and B’nai B’rith member, and was
cancelled as a company in 1970, the year of Yassenoff’s death. Local media
reports cite Yassenoff as having been president of Brittany Builders. Yassenoft’s
son, Solly Yassenoff, later told the Columbus Dispatch that he knew for a fact that
his father had been involved in making bribes to public officials in connection
with real estate deals while he had been president of Brittany Builders.22

A year later, in 1973, Columbus police claimed that Yassenoff and Rich were
killed during a robbery, a claim they had not made at the time of their deaths.
However, this claim only emerged when police reported that the prime suspect in
that robbery and their murders, Joseph Bogen, had been killed by his partner,
Rudolph Glenn. Police also stated that Bogen, Yassenoff, and Rich had all been
killed with the same gun due to ballistics tests they had conducted, meaning that
the gun Glenn had used to kill Bogen was also the weapon they believed was used
to kill Yassenoff and Rich. Yet, police claimed that the gun in question was “never
recovered” even though they could have ostensibly obtained it from Glenn. Glenn
was cleared of any wrongdoing in Bogen’s death due to a self-defense plea and the
murders of Yassenoff and Rich are still classified as unsolved.

It later emerged that Kessler was heavily involved in resolving issues related to
Yassenoff’s estate after his death, with Arthur Shapiro also being heavily involved
as he was the attorney who served as the executor of Yassenoft’s will. Kessler and a
woman named Marjorie Dyer were the only witnesses who had signed Yassenoft’s
will and Kessler had also come under suspicion when Dyer died in a suspicious
auto accident. It was later reported by the Columbus Dispatch that Kessler, Shapiro,
and Yassenoff had all been “connected through a maze of business dealings?”

Perhaps most unsettling of all is the fact that, when police researchers were
looking for the files on the Yassenoff murder case during the investigation into
Shapiro’s murder, they were unable to locate them.” This suggests that some
police official or officials had deliberately removed or destroyed those documents.
The interconnectedness of Yassenoff, Shapiro, and Kessler and other

aforementioned information suggests that members of local law enforcement were
involved in a series of cover ups in Yassenoft’s, Rich’s, and Shapiro's murders and
potentially in the death of Marjorie Dyer as well. Did Berry Kessler, an
accountant, really wield enough influence in Ohio to avoid being heavily
scrutinized for not just one but several murders? It seems unlikely.

In the case of the Shapiro murder, more evidence later emerged to suggest that
a cover-up had indeed taken place. The main evidence in question emerged in
1996 when then-Columbus Police Chief James Jackson was under investigation
for corruption. As a part of that investigation, Jackson was charged with the
“improper disposal of a public record for ordering the destruction of a report on
the Shapiro homicide” %

The report had been written by Elizabeth A. Leupp, an analyst with Columbus
police’s Organized Crime Bureau, and sent to the commander of the Intelligence
Bureau, Curtis K. Marcum, on June 6, 1991. James Jackson quickly suppressed the
document and then ordered its destruction less than a month after it had been
written. According to reports, Marcum bypassed protocol in order to carry out
Jackson's order. The charge was upheld by the Civil Service Commission and
Jackson received a five-day suspension for destroying a public record.” Jackson
had justified his actions by claiming that the report was “filled with wild
speculation about prominent business leaders” and “potentially libelous.”

Though the document in question was believed to have been destroyed, it was
later obtained by Bob Fitrakis — attorney, journalist and executive director of the
Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism — after Fitrakis was accidentally
sent a copy of the report in 1998 as part of a public records request.22 When
confronted with the document after Fitrakis reported on its contents, Jackson
responded “I thought I got rid of it? adding that the report was “scandalous.”
However, another high-ranking law enforcement official familiar with the Shapiro
murder investigation told Fitrakis at the time that “the report is a viable and
valuable document in an open murder investigation.’

The report is officially titled “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and
Hypothesis” (henceforth referred to as the Shapiro Murder File in this book) 1%
The report was most likely suppressed to protect two of Ohio's wealthiest men
who are both named in the document — Leslie Wexner and Edward DeBartolo Sr.
Notably, the document does not mention Berry L. Kessler once.12 It does,
however, mention John W. “Jack” Kessler, former Columbus City Council

President, and co-founder of the New Albany company alongside Wexner, as well
as Wexner associate Jerry Hammond, and former Columbus City Council
member Les Wright. Jack Kessler would go on to become a board member of
Banc One and later JPMorgan, where he played a key role in the hiring of current
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Notably, JPMorgan would be the main bank
used by Epstein for several years following the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008.

The document notes that the law firm where Shapiro worked, called Schwartz,
Shapiro, Kelm & Warren at the time of his murder but later called Schwartz, Kelm,
Warren & Rubenstein, was representing Wexner’s company The Limited. Arthur
Shapiro, prior to and at the time of his death, managed The Limited’s account with
the law firm, and was in direct contact with Robert Morosky, the top man at The
Limited after Wexner. Morosky left The Limited in 1987 and had previously been
referred to by New York Magazine as “one of those real demons of American
business.”122 Stanley Schwartz, a senior partner at Shapiro’s firm, took over the
account following Shapiro's murder.

Shortly after Shapiro was killed, per the document, Schwartz incorporated
Samax Trading Corporation, which was controlled by Wexner, with the express
purpose of engaging in “business liquidation.” Through Samax, the report notes,
Wexner acquired 70% of Omni Oil/Omni Exploration and was elected to its
board of directors along with Schwartz that same year.

However, Ohio state records show there is more to the story. Schwartz
incorporated the Samax Trading Corporation and Samax Trading Company
within one month of each other in 1987, per state records. Samax Trading
Company did not adopt the name Samax until 1987 and had previously been
called JAS Liquidation Inc. Company records include a consent letter stating that
the board of directors of Lewex Inc., another company controlled by Wexner, had
given its consent for JAS to adopt Samax as its trade name. Thus, it was JAS, not
Samax that was incorporated in 1985, but the company does not appear to have
been incorporated in Ohio as it does not appear in that state’s records, despite its
address being listed as within Columbus, Ohio. It is possible that the company
was reincorporated in Ohio under a different name, Samax, two years after its
initial creation, potentially to obfuscate its previous activities in liquidating
“distressed businesses.” One month after JAS became the Samax Trading
Company, the Samax Trading Corporation was also incorporated as an Ohio
corporation by Stanley Schwartz as a holding company for shares in Omni Oil.

Company records note that the trade name, Samax Trading Corporation, had
been used by Schwartz and Wexner since July 1985.12°

The year that JAS became Samax, 1987, Schwartz also incorporated the
Wexner Investment Company. Harold Levin, Wexner’s top money manager from
1983 to 1990, was its initial president according to the Shapiro Murder File. Levin
was also listed as Vice President of PFI Leasing, which shared the same telephone
number and address as the Wexner Investment Company. PFI Leasing was
incorporated by Levin in 1983, the year he began managing Wexner’s fortune.1°°
Records list the address of Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein, then listed as
Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren. The Shapiro Murder File also notes that, in
1986, Richard Rubenstein, of Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein, was given a
speeding ticket while driving a vehicle registered to PFI Leasing Company.

The Wexner Investment Company, at the time the Shapiro Murder File was
written in 1991, also shared a different office with Omni Oil and Intercontinental
Realty. Intercontinental Realty was incorporated the same year as the Wexner
Investment Company with the involvement of Dorothy Snow, an attorney at
Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein.124 The name is somewhat similar to the
name of Epstein’s main company in the 1980s — Intercontinental Assets Group.

At the time the Shapiro Murder File was written, the head of Wexner
Investment Company and Wexner’s new money manager was Jeffrey Epstein,
whose name is notably not mentioned in the Shapiro Murder File. Crucially, the
year 1987, when many of these changes with Samax and the creation of the
Investment Company took place, is the very year that Jeffrey Epstein began to
serve as a financial adviser to Wexner. Levin was forced out of the Wexner
Investment Company in 1990 after Epstein was put in charge, effectively
demoting Levin and prompting him to resign a few months afterward. It is
unknown how involved Epstein was in these different entities from 1987 until he
formally became Wexner’s money manager in 1990. However, Epstein must have
significantly benefitted Wexner during this period to warrant such a rapid and
dramatic promotion within a 3-year span and he may have been involved in some
of the business decisions detailed in this report.

Notably, once Epstein had taken over as Wexner’s top money manager, PFI
Leasing was dissolved in 1990. Records of its dissolution list Wexner as Director
and President of PFI Leasing and Epstein as its Vice President.1% Levin had been

delisted as the company’s agent just a few weeks prior+/2 Both Samax companies

were similarly dissolved in 1992, though the records of their dissolution are not
publicly available.

Just before Epstein became involved with Wexner’s inner circle, in 1986, John
W. Kessler and Wexner co-founded the New Albany Company. The Shapiro
Murder File report notes that the Wexner Investment Company and PFI Leasing
shared a telephone number and office on the 37" floor of Columbus’ Huntington
Center, which is also the address listed for John W. Kessler Company and the New
Albany Company (The significance of the Huntington Center was discussed in
the previous chapter). A 1993 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and cited by
Bob Fitrakis describes the origins of the New Albany Company as follows:

Legend has it that in 1986 or so, Jack and Les were cruising in Les’ Land Rover near New
Albany, about 12 miles from downtown Columbus. They saw acre after acre of empty farmland.
Virgin soil. And thus the billionaire, getting a vision thing, declared to his buddy, this will be my

new home. H

That same report states that “Wexner and Kessler formed the New Albany Co.
and spun off a bunch of paper corporations to cover their footprints. Then their
minions knocked on doors and made the proverbial offers you couldn't refuse.’
The aforementioned business linkages between the New Albany Company, PFI
Leasing, the Wexner Investment Company, the Samax companies, Omni Oil, and
Intercontinental Realty are worth reconsidering given this context, especially
considering that - per the Columbus police — they were suspected of being
somehow connected to the organized crime style murder of Arthur Shapiro.

It is worth noting that Epstein himself was involved in New Albany as well. By
the late 1980s, he was a general partner in New Albany’s real estate holding
company (called New Albany Property) and he had put at least a few million
dollars into the project. Fitrakis told New York Magazine in 2002 that Epstein’s role
in New Albany was significant, stating “Before Epstein came along in 1988, the
financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a
total mess |... ] Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other
capacities” H2 Epstein would later obtain a 23-room mansion and estate at the
New Albany development from Wexner in 1992.13

Per Fitrakis, New Albany’s success required changes be made to Columbus
city policy as well as zoning laws.” This is alluded to in the Shapiro Murder File
as having been accomplished through questionable investments made by a
Wexner-controlled entity in a jazz club run by former City Council member Jerry

Hammond and his successor on the council, Les Wright. The Wexner-controlled
entity in this case was called SNJC Holding Inc., incorporated in 1987, and gives
the same address as the Wexner Investment Company at the Huntington Center.
The Shapiro Murder File then cites circumstantial evidence regarding how
Hammond was mysteriously able to make payments on a luxury apartment
despite not having enough known income for such payments, suggesting a bribe
had been paid. Hammond had also been “swept up in an emotional debate about
the Wexley luxury housing project [i.e., the New Albany project] in 1988” and was
accused by local officials of selling out the city’s interests to benefit his “friend”
Leslie Wexner.

Even though New Albany Company managed to secure these local policy
changes, regardless of how it was actually accomplished, some of its subsequent
projects were later accused of acting in complete disregard for existing state and

city law, though no action was taken against the company. H*

WEXNER AND THE MOB

he Shapiro Murder File also notes that the motive for Shapiro’s murder was

most likely related to the IRS investigation, stating that Shapiro was due to
appear before a grand jury in connection with that investigation the day after his
murder occurred. It states “while the motive remains unclear, the suspect is an
individual who (a) knew Shapiro and had some personal/professional contact
with him; (b) would benefit from his death or from ensuring his silence; (c) had
close contact with LCN [La Cosa Nostra — mafia, or organized crime] figures or
trusted LCN associates; and (d) had the personal financial resources to afford the
cost of the contract (“hit”)?

The Shapiro Murder File hypothesizes that Wexner and/or his associates were
involved in ordering or financing the “hit” on Shapiro. It discusses several
transactions of questionable ethics and legality involving associates of Wexner,
specifically Kessler, Wright, and Hammond, and some involving Wexner himself.
Regarding these transactions, the report states that “Arthur Shapiro could have
answered too many of these sort of questions, and might have been forced to
answer them in his impending Grand Jury hearing; Stanley Schwartz might now
be able to answer some of the same questions for the same reason, but does not
face a Grand Jury, is immersed in the pattern [of questionable Wexner-
linked/Wexner-adjacent transactions] himself, and now has a powerful incentive
to maintain discretion.”

The most important part of the Shapiro Murder File, from the perspective of
this book, is related to the report’s discussion of Wexner associates with ties to
organized crime, specifically the Genovese crime family. Those associates are
Edward DeBartolo Sr. and Frank Walsh.

Edward DeBartolo Sr. was born in 1909 and got his start working for his
stepfather’s construction business, Michael DeBartolo Construction.® In the
1940s, DeBartolo founded his own company, Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation,
and eventually became a real estate baron, mainly of suburban shopping malls and
complexes. Some of his earlier ventures, such as the 1960 purchase of the
Thistledown racetrack near Cleveland, Ohio, involved the Emprise Corporation,
which was indicted and convicted in 1972 for racketeering and serving as a front
for organized crime“ In 1976, Cleveland Magazine described DeBartolo’s

business empire as “deliberately labyrinthian” with each venture encapsulated as a
separate corporation, some of them being joint ventures with the real estate arm
of a major retailer. H8

DeBartolo appears in the Shapiro Murder File listed as a Youngstown, Ohio-
based real estate developer associated with Leslie Wexner. The report states that
the two men “have a well-known history of business and investment partnerships,
and in the late 1980s, twice attempted jointly to acquire Carter-Hawley-Hale
Department Stores,” with that partnership having received considerable press
attention at the time.H? The Shapiro Murder File goes on to state that DeBartolo
is an “associate of the Genovese-LaRocca crime family in Pittsburgh,” information
that — per other indications in the report — seems to have been sourced from the
Pennsylvania Crime Commission. At the time of the Shapiro murder, the boss of
the Genovese crime family was Tony Salerno.

There is much more to DeBartolo’s links to organized crime than those
mentioned in the Shapiro Murder File. According to investigative journalist Dan
Moldea, a 1981 report from US Customs Service special agent William F. Burda
asserted that DeBartolo’ business empire was “operating money-laundering
schemes, realising huge profits from narcotics, guns, skimming operations, and
other organized-crime-related activities” through Florida-based banks in which
DeBartolo had controlling interests.2° Burda further claimed that DeBartolo’s
organization, specifically the parts of his empire based in Florida, had reported
“ties to [Carlos] Marcello, [Santos] Trafficante, and [Meyer] Lansky and, because
of its enormous wealth and power has high-ranking political influence and
affiliations? 124

An earlier report authored by Burda and cited by Moldea stated that “Meyer
Lansky, the financial wizard of OC [Organized Crime], is now considered by most
to be almost senile and getting out of the business. His successor and new
financial wizard is recognized as Edward J. DeBartolo”

The ties of DeBartolo to criminal activity as mentioned by Burda’s reports are
supported by other documents. For instance, a confidential report from Florida
Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) stated that the “WFC Corporation is a
cover for the largest narcotics operation in the world” and further states that the
organization, under federal and Florida state investigation in the late 1970s, had
been heavily influenced by Santos Trafficante22 WFC Corporation was
previously mentioned in chapter 7.

In 1979, Florida authorities were investigating “spurious loans made by WFC
Corporation from its Grand Cayman Island subsidiary, through Metropolitan
Bank and Trust Company of Tampa, a banking institution whose majority
stockholder is Edward DeBartolo Sr’** DeBartolo had bought Metropolitan
Bank in 1975 and had such a strong position that he was able to unilaterally force
the resignation of the bank’s president in 1981, with other board members having
no say in the matter whatsoever. The bank collapsed a year later, which bank
leadership attributed to bad real estate loans.*“* At the time, it was the largest bank
failure in Florida history.

Furthermore, DeBartolo had appeared on the Justice Departments 1970
Organized Crime Principal Subjects List, which listed individuals with suspected
links to organized crime.” In the late 1970s, an FBI wiretap of Los Angeles-
based mob figure Jimmy Fratianno picked up Fratianno’s claims that DeBartolo
was “very friendly” with Ronald Carabbia, the mob boss of DeBartolo’s
hometown of Youngstown, Ohio./28

Wexner’s cozy association with DeBartolo is thus highly significant. While the
Shapiro Murder File reports there is a connection between DeBartolo and
organized crime, it offers little in the way of specifics, whereas other sources,
including the work of Dan Moldea, elucidates this connection to a considerable
degree. Indeed, this additional information shows that DeBartolo worked with
known to mob figures throughout the country and was close to several high-
ranking members in prominent organized crime networks, as well as allegations
that he had taken on the mantle of Meyer Lansky himself.

DeBartolo was one of Ohio’s richest men during his lifetime and, like Wexner,
lived his life above the law, having investigations and charges dismissed left and
right due to his power and political influence. That legacy has continued with
DeBartolo’s son and heir, Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., who was pardoned by Donald
Trump right before the former president left office.”

Another close business partner of Wexner’s mentioned in the Shapiro Murder
File, Francis J. “Frank” Walsh, similarly had ties to organized crime, specifically the
Genovese crime family. As the Shapiro Murder File notes, Walsh was “owner and
chief executive officer of Walsh Trucking Company out of New Jersey” and
“Walsh Trucking is/has been [the] primary transporter for The Limited in
Columbus.’ The document goes on to note that Walsh was under investigation by
the New York Organized Crime Task Force in 1984 and all notices sent to Walsh

in connection with this investigation were addressed to Frank Walsh Financial
Resources at One Limited Parkway, Columbus, Ohio — the same address of
Wexner’s The Limited.

In addition to what is mentioned in the Shapiro Murder File, Frank Walsh was
charged in 1988 by then-District Attorney Samuel Alito Jr., now a US Supreme
Court Justice, with paying thousands to officers of a corrupt Teamsters union as
well as members of the Genovese crime family in exchange for a “sweetheart”
union contract.2 This corroborates the claim in the Shapiro Murder File that
Walsh had ties to the Genovese crime family.

Per Alito, the case “illustrated how certain seemingly legitimate businesses are
able to get a jump on their competitors by entering into an agreement with
organized crime and it illustrates how organized crime is able to get enormous
profits by entering into an agreement with seemingly legitimate businesses.” Tony
Salerno, the Genovese crime boss, was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in
the case13+

After the charges were filed, Walsh was arrested at his home. According to his
lawyer, Walsh — at that point - had somehow become a real estate developer
worth between $60 and $100 million, while Walsh Trucking, among other
companies of his, had been forced into bankruptcy by an antitrust suit. Walsh pled
guilty to the charges and was sentenced to four years of prison in 1990.132

Walsh was again accused of corruption years later in 2003, when a Teamsters
Union filed internal charges against a member of their executive board, Donato
DeSanti. DeSanti was accused of “helping Walsh, whom he knew to be a
convicted labor racketeer with ties to organized crime, manipulate officers of
[Teamsters Local] 107 into cooperating with a scheme DeSanti knew, or should
have known, was of questionable legality” +33 The union further charged DeSanti
with hiding Walsh’s past conviction and organized crime association from union
members.

These connections, as laid out in the Shapiro Murder File, present Arthur
Shapiro’ 1985 murder in a different light than what is conventionally reported.
While Berry L. Kessler may well have played a role in Arthur Shapiro's death, it
seems unlikely that he had the political pull to push police to cover-up not one,
but three apparently connected murders — Arthur Shapiro, Frank Yassenoff, and
Yassenoft’s fiancée Ella Rich — or the financial resources to pay for a professional
contract killing. Given the evidence, it appears that Kessler was a deeply corrupt

operator, but most likely a middleman for the dirty deed, if he was in fact involved
in orchestrating a “hit” on Shapiro.

These concerns appear to be what led Columbus Police investigators to
produce a document like the Shapiro Murder File in the first place. Its subsequent
suppression and attempted destruction suggest that the scrutiny aimed squarely at
Leslie Wexner was too close for comfort for those in law enforcement seeking to
protect the criminal nexus that was ultimately responsible for Shapiro's death.

That the police would move to protect Wexner isn’t that surprising
considering the billionaire’s cozy ties to area law enforcement are well known,
with local police doubling as his security staff at his New Albany home and with
the chief of police even vacationing at Wexner’s home in Vail, Colorado. Wexner’s
involvement with suspect entities and actors continued well after the Shapiro case,
with Jeffrey Epstein being the most infamous. Yet, the blatant murder of The
Limited’s lawyer under these circumstances is the first documented instance and,
arguably, one of the more important.

MEETING EPSTEIN

Js Wexner’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has mystified mainstream

media outlets, executives of The Limited, and other Wexner associates,
friends, and acquaintances. Years after the pair “officially” parted ways during
Epstein’s first arrest and subsequent imprisonment, in 2019, the New York Times
reported that, from the very beginning, “Wexner's friends and colleagues were
mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would
place such trust in an outsider with a thin résumé and scant financial experience,’
with that “outsider” being Jeffrey Epstein.+4

Yet, as noted in the last two chapters, Epstein was hardly the “outsider” that
mainstream media and his associates — from the close to the distant — have strove
to portray him since his second arrest, and subsequent death, in 2019.

Indeed, “outsider” Epstein was reportedly introduced to Wexner around 1985
by a well-connected insurance executive named Robert Meister who was a “close
friend” of Wexner’s at the time.+$ Though most media reports on the Wexner-
Epstein relationship refer to Meister as being an executive at Aon Insurance, at the
time he allegedly made this introduction he had recently become vice chairman of
Alexander & Alexander (A&A), “the second largest insurance brokerage company,
and the largest retail insurance broker, in the world.”1*°

Since around 1958, A&A had been a major provider of consulting services to
W.R. Grace & Co., the company led by J. Peter Grace. Grace was discussed in
Chapter 10 in connection with both Covenant House and AmeriCares. In the
early 1990s, A&A “was awarded a $350 million insurance brokerage contract by
the government of Kuwait to find marine and war-risk insurance for $500 million
worth of cargo to be shipped from all over the world as part of an international
relief effort,’ the same relief effort that involved both AmeriCares and the CIA-
linked Southern Air Transport also discussed in Chapter 10.1°2

Meister joined A&A at a time when it was particularly troubled. The
company’s troubles in 1985 were largely related to its acquisition of the Alexander
Howden group, which — soon after it was acquired — revealed it was missing
around $50 million in assets that had been apparently embezzled and “diverted to

corporations based in Panama and Liechtenstein”! $8 Could Meister have met

Epstein through Epstein’s purported job as a “financial bounty hunter” who was
equally capable of tracking down, as well as helping to hide, embezzled funds?

It may well have been the case. According to Meister, Epstein had “struck up a
conversation” with the insurance mogul during “a commercial flight to Palm
Beach” and Meister remembered “being impressed with the young banker.”
However, at the time that Meister had met Epstein, he had already left Bear
Stearns and was managing his financial “bounty hunting” firm IAG.

Not long after their initial introduction, Meister claims that Epstein invited
him to play racquetball and began “turning up in the steam room at [Meister’s]
gym while he was using it.” The two men apparently became well acquainted and,
soon, Epstein asked Meister to introduce him to Wexner, claiming that “he had

learned Wexner’s money manager was stealing from him?”42 Epstein offered his

financial “bounty hunter” skills and said he could “help recover those funds.”1“+
Per Meister, he subsequently arranged a meeting between Epstein and Wexner at
Wexner’s Colorado vacation home.

Unfortunately, Meister is the only person to have made claims about these
events and, as a result, there is no way to corroborate them. However, Wexner
subsequently claimed in a statement after Epstein’s 2019 arrest that he had only
ever hired Epstein because friends of his, presumably Meister among them,
“recommended him as a knowledgeable financial professional.’ If true, this
would further suggest that Meister, perhaps at A&A’s behest, may have employed
Epstein’s “bounty hunting” services.

Meister has stated his relationship with Epstein ended not long after he made
the introduction between the two men and that he began spending much less time
with Wexner when the Ohio billionaire declined to heed his alleged warnings
about Epstein. However, Meister’s claims may not be entirely accurate. Indeed, in
1990, roughly five years after he introduced Wexner and Epstein, it was Meister’s
wife Wendy who introduced Wexner to Abigail Koppel, a corporate lawyer at the
London office of the powerful, white-shoe law firm Davis Polk (now Davis Polk &
Wardwell).

As previously mentioned, Abigail’s father was a major figure in the Haganah
who opened the first American office of El Al Airlines, a frequent front for Israeli
intelligence. At the time, Davis Polk was representing Wexner’s company, The
Limited. Thus, the Meisters were still connected enough to Wexner to make this
important introduction at that time. Notably, Epstein was also involved with

aspects of Wexner’s relationship with Abigail, having reportedly arranged their
prenuptial agreement and attended their January 1993 wedding.

Regardless of the exact truth of the Meisters’ relationship with Wexner
following the introduction to Epstein, Epstein’s entry into Wexner’s world would
dramatically alter his behavior as well as his public profile. For instance, Wexner
began dying his hair, hiring a live-in personal trainer, and began dressing
differently soon after Epstein came into his life, adopting a new style of clothing
that Wexner’s colleagues reportedly began to call “chairman’s casual.”“8

Wexner also took on new interests. According to Jerry Merritt, a former Ohio
state highway patrolman who later served as The Limited's security chief for over
two decades, not long after Wexner hired Epstein as a financial adviser, Wexner
“had started collecting guns, but Les didn't know which end of a gun worked.”
Nevertheless, Wexner invited Epstein to shoot targets with him in rural Ohio.
Even though Merritt had arranged for a “world-class trap shooter to teach Wexner
to shoot,” Wexner instead wanted Epstein to teach him.

This could have happened because Epstein, at this point, had had considerable
connections to powerful, intelligence-linked arms dealers and may have privately
disclosed these connections to Wexner. It’s certainly possible, given that Epstein is
reported to have said “Les knows everything about me. He knows every
experience I’ve had.”+*#

Wexner likely knew more about Epstein than mainstream media reports have
led on and Epstein’s connections to arms dealing and Israeli intelligence may have
impressed Wexner, just as much as (if not more so than) his talents for both legal
and illegal financial maneuvers. Indeed, it’s worth keeping in mind that Epstein’s
introduction to Wexner came not long after the suspect murder of Arthur Shapiro,
and Epstein’s connections to certain circles along with his financial “talents” could
have been very attractive to someone like Leslie Wexner.

By 1987, Epstein was formally a financial adviser to Wexner, where he helped
manage Wexner’s fortune and offered advice about the finances of Wexner’s
businesses, namely The Limited, and his other endeavors, like the Wexner
Foundation. In the late 1980s, Epstein was also the main force behind the design
and construction of Wexner’s yacht, named Limitless.“®

By 1990, Wexner’s apparent fascination with Epstein alienated key figures in
his inner circle, including former vice chairman of The Limited Robert Morosky

and even Wexner’s mother, Bella.14° In the case of the latter, it seemed that

Wexner’s mother saw her long privileged position as a driving force behind her
son's business decisions directly challenged by Epstein. As noted in a 2021 article
published in Vanity Fair:

Wexner may have been CEO, but it seemed that his mother, Bella, was the boss. For 34 years she
served as The Limited’s corporate secretary. A former executive [of The Limited] recalled that
Bella belittled her son in meetings when she didn’t like his ideas. “It'll never work! Don’t do it!”
Bella would yell in front of his staff. “I remember sitting there thinking, How dare this woman?”
the executive said. Les seemed to be terrified of Bella. According to [Robert] Meister, Les would
sometimes stay at Meister’s house in Palm Beach so that Bella, whose Palm Beach house was
near Les’s, wouldnt know Les was in town. “He was afraid of her. She was running his life,”

Meister said 142

Epstein’s growing influence over Wexner’s affairs and Bella Wexner’s previous
(and apparently domineering) role were seemingly incompatible and, when Bella
fell ill in the early 1990s, an inevitable rupture ensued. While she was too ill to
fulfil her role at the Wexner Foundation, which she had co-founded with her son
in 1973, Epstein took over her role as trustee. When she recovered, she demanded
to be reinstated and the Wexner Foundation, with Epstein as trustee, ended up
suing her in 1992 as a result. +48 Epstein later claimed that he and Bella had “settled
by splitting the foundation in two.”

By that point, it had already been clear for some time that Leslie Wexner had
decided to replace his mother with Epstein in terms of who would serve as his
closest adviser. In 1990, as previously mentioned, Epstein had become head of the
Wexner Investment Company and Wexner’s top money manager, ousting his
predecessor Harold Levin in the process. A year later, in July 1991, Wexner had
handed near complete control of his affairs over to Epstein in a far-reaching Power
of Attorney document. That document, among other powers, gave Epstein the
ability to “ask, demand, sue for, recover, collect, and receive all sums of money” on
Wexner’s behalf as well as take over, buy, sell, or transfer “property, tangible or
intangible.” The document also notes that, at the time, Epstein was still occupying
the offices he apparently shared with the Gouletas at the Villard Houses, which —
as previously noted — had been arranged by Steven Hoffenberg.

This power of attorney is significant as it means Epstein could engage in these
activities without Wexner’s knowledge following the signing of this document.
Thus, after this point and up until the 2000s, it is hard to know what decisions of
Wexner’s (and Wexner-owned businesses like The Limited) may have been made
solely by Epstein. This is particularly important when considering that shortly

after this document was signed, efforts were made to have the logistics of The
Limited intimately connected to not one, but two, CIA-linked airlines that had
become infamous in the 1980s for their use in Iran-Contra and broader efforts
that involved the smuggling of both arms and drugs. More on those airlines, and
Epstein’s role in bringing them into The Limited’s fold, are discussed in chapter 17.

In addition to his influence on the logistics of Wexner-owned businesses,
Epstein became increasingly enmeshed with Wexner’s real estate interests during
and shortly after this period, particularly in New York City. As detailed in the
previous chapter, this would include Wexner’s acquisition and redecorating of the
now infamous Manhattan townhouse that Epstein would inhabit and where he
would abuse countless underage women for several years, enabled by Ghislaine
Maxwell and others.

Endnotes

- O ON WWM

27

William H. Meyers, “Rag Trade Revolutionary,’ New York Times, June 8, 1986,

Meyers, “Rag Trade.”
Meyers, “Rag Trade.”
Isadore Barmash, “The Acquisition Kings of Women’s Wear,’ New York Times, March 31, 1985,

wear.html.

Julie Baumgold, “Bachelor Billionaire,” New York Magazine, August 5, 1985.

Baumgold, “Bachelor Billionaire.’

Meyers, “Rag Trade.”

Meyers, “Rag Trade.”

Baumgold, “Bachelor Billionaire.’

Bob Fitrakis, “Jeffrey Epstein: There's Much More to the Story,’ Free Press, June 18, 2020,

Peter Golden, Quiet Diplomat: A Biography of Max M. Fisher (New York: Cornwall Books, 1992),
148.

Golden, Quiet Diplomat, 148.

Bancroft, “Max Fisher.”

Bancroft, “Max Fisher.”

Bancroft, “Max Fisher.”

Joe T. Darden et al., eds., Detroit, Race and Uneven Development, Comparative American Cities
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 56.

Bancroft, “Max Fisher.”

Barry Grey, “Fifty Years since the Detroit Rebellion,’ World Socialist Web Site, July 24, 2017,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/24/riot-j24.html.

Grey, “Detroit Rebellion.’

Darden, et al., eds., Detroit, 106-7.

Grey, “Detroit Rebellion.’

Darden, et al., eds., Detroit, 4.

Darden, et al., eds., Detroit, 58.

Alex Taylor III, “The $400 Million Friendship,’ CNN Money, April 9, 1990,
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/04/09/73361/index.htm.
Arlene Lazarowitz, “American Jewish Leaders and President Gerald R. Ford: Disagreements
Over The Middle East Reassessment Plan,’ American Jewish History 98, no. 3 (2014), 175-200,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26414374.

“Max M Fisher 1908-2005,” The Jewish Agency,

28
29

30

31

32

33

34
35
36

37

38

39

40
41

42
43
44
45

46

47

48

49
50

Taylor, “$400 Million Friendship.”

“United Fruit?C.l.A. Link Charged,” New York Times, October 22, 1976,
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/10/22/archives/united-fruitcia-link-charged.html.

“Eli Black's Rites Attended by 500,” New York Times, February 6, 1975,
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/06/archives/eli-blacks-rites-attended-by-500-united-
brands-head-hailed-for.html.

Josh Kosman, “Leon Black Kept Jeffrey Epstein as Charity Director after Plea Deal,” New York

ty-director-after-plea-deal/.
Robert Lindsey, “Taubman?Alien Group Is Winner Of Irvine as It Tops Mobil’s Offer,” New York

is-winner-of-irvine-as-it-tops-mobils-offer. html. mi
A. Alfred Taubman, Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career ofa Luxury Retailing
Pioneer, 1st ed (New York: Collins, 2007), 51.

Taubman, Threshold Resistance, 51.

Taubman, Threshold Resistance, 49.

“Biography” A. Alfred Taubman papers: 1942-2014,” (Bentley Historical Library),
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bhlead/umich-bhl-201 1097.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the
Bahamas (Routledge, 1991) 33-35.

Dan E. Moldea, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football, 1st ed
(New York: Morrow, 1989), 450, https://archive.org/details/interferencehowo00mold/.

Moldea, Interference, 450.
Taylor, “$400 Million Friendship.”
Leslie Eaton, “Knight Errant Or Erring? Sotheby's Tale,’ New York Times, April 27, 2000,

Fabrikant, “Sotherby’s Stake.’

Taylor, “$400 Million Friendship.”

Rita Reif, “Taubman to Buy Out Southeby Rivals,’ New York Times, June 29, 1983,

“Bid for Zapata: How It Arose,’ New York Times, October 15, 1981,
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/15/business/bid-for-zapata-how-it-arose.html.

Tax Aspects of Acquisitions and Mergers Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and
Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of
Rep-resentatives, Ninety-ninth Congress, First Session, April 1, 2, and 16, 1985, 238.
Advanced Coal Combustion Systems Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Development
and Applications of the Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives,
Ninety-sixth Congress, Second session, September 16, 17, 1980, 191.

John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, ePub
(Nebraska: AWT, 1992), 134.

DeCamp, Franklin Cover-Up, 145.

Taylor, “$400 Million Friendship,’; Reif, “Taubman to Buy Out Southeby Rivals.’

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61
62

63
64

65

66

Jon Nordheimer, “Taubman Forms Company to Operate Sotheby's, New York Times,
September 20, 1983,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1983/09/20/176380.html.

Taylor, “$400 Million Friendship.”

Emily Chasan, “Trial Begins in Lehman, Barclays Dispute over Sale,” Reuters, April 26, 2010,
https://www.reuters.com/article/lehman-barclays-idUSN2619364820100426.

Eaton, “Knight Errant.”

Ralph Blumenthal, “Taubman Datebooks Cited In Sotheby’s Collusion Trial,” New York Times,
November 14, 2001,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2001/11/14/184578.html.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Two Families, Two Empires and One Big Brawl at the Mall,” New York
Times, December 1, 2002,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2002/12/01/157511.html.

Ralph Blumenthal and Carol Vogel, “Ex-Chief of Sotheby's Gets Probation and Fine,’ New York
Times, April 30, 2002,
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2002/04/30/803561.html.

“Taubman Sentenced To One Year--Plus A Day,’ Forbes, April 22, 2002,
https://www.forbes.com/2002/04/22/0422taubman.html.

Caroline Graham, “Ghislaine Maxwell Trawled Galleries for Girls to Meet Jeffrey Epstein,’ Mail
Online, August 9, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8608267/Ghislaine-
Maxwell-trawled-galleries-gallerinas-meet-Jeffrey-Epstein-claims-former-friend.html.

Two other Ohio businessmen that Lindner was closely associated, both personally and
professionally, would become major players in the collapse of the American savings and
loans industry: Marvin Warner (of ComBanks, Great American Bank, and most notoriously,
Home State Saving) and Charles Keating (of American Continental Corporation—previously
known as American Continental Homes, the housing division of Lindner’s American
Financial.) Importantly, American Financial Corporation boasted Hugh Culverhouse on its
board of directors. It is unknown at this time whether or not it was Culverhouse Sr. or
Culverhouse Jr.; Hugh Culverhouse Sr. had sat on the board of directors of Major Realty with
Max Orovitz. He held this position when Major Realty sold its property to future Wexner-
business partner Edward J. DeBartolo, for whom he also acted as tax attorney.

Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.l. Books, Dec. 1992), 291.

“National Defense Council Foundation,’ Militarist Monitor, January 9, 1989, https://militarist-
monitor.org/national_ defense council foundation/. On the National Defense Council
Foundation’s principles, see “National Defense Council Foundation,’ Militarist Monitor; on
the role of Humphreys as Civilian Material Assistance paymaster, see the deposition of
Thomas V. Posey: Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,
Appendix B, Volume 21, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, 115-117,
https://archive.org/details/reportofcongress87unit.

Brewton, The Mafia, 290.

Robert A. Liff “Cocaine Indictment Names Prominent Bahamian Lawyer” Orlando Sentinel,
September 19th, 1985.

Brewton, The Mafia, 294-95. It is worth pointing out that Helliwell and Singlaub both served
in the China-Burma theater in the OSS.

Darden, et al., eds., Detroit, 56.

67
68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

ii

78

79
80
81

82

83

84
85

“Max M Fisher 1908-2005.”

Yosef |. Abramowitz, “Break-Lines: How Conservative Israelis and Reform U.S. Jews Are Torn,”
Jerusalem Post, October 13, 2018, https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/Of-Federations-
and-fault-lines-569186.

Michael Omer-Man, “This Week in History: Operation Moses Begins,’ Jerusalem Post,
November 19, 2010, https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/This-week-in-History-
Operation-Moses-begins; Jacob Stein, “GOP’s Max Fisher, Tireless Advocate For World Jewry,
The Forward, March 11, 2005, https://forward.com/news/3062/gop-e2-80-99s-max-fisher-
tireless-advocate-for-world-je/.

“Max Fisher Calls for End to Party Structure in Wzo, Says It Interferes with ‘Effective

m

Functioning,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 7, 19880, https://www.jta.org/archive/max-

4

led-jewish-immigration.html.
Rahul Radhakrishnan and Will Jordan, “Spy Cables: Israel Airline Used as Intelligence ‘Front,”

airline-used-as-intelligence-front.
Radhakrishnan and Jordan, “Spy Cables.”
“Louis Pincus Fund Established,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 24, 1975,

“Livia Eisen Chertoff (1925-1998),’ Find a Grave,
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/176914514/livia-chertoff.

Whitney Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings,’
MintPress News, September 6, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-
jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/.

“United Jewish Appeal V-E Day Commemorative Medal - Max Fisher,’ The Max M Fisher

medal?dis-play=list.
Meyers, “Rag Trade.”
“Max M Fisher 1908-2005,”

“Wexner Foundation to Channel $3-4 Million in Grants to Help Enhance and Improve
Professional Leaders,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 22, 1987,
https://www,jta.org/archive/wexner-foundation-to-channel-3-4-million-in-grants-to-help-
enhance-and-improve-professional-leaders.

Steve Stephens and Bruce Cadwallader, “Informant Led Way in Florida Arrest,’ Columbus
Dispatch, September 9, 1993, p. 04D.

“25-Year-Old Killing Still Puzzles,’ Columbus Dispatch, March 6, 2010,

/NEWS/303069782.
“25-Year-Old Killing.’
“Accountant held in murder plot,’ Pasco Times, September 8, 1993.

86
87
88
89

90

91

92

93
94
95
96
27

98
99
100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

Stephens and Cadwallader, “Informant Led Way.”
Stephens and Cadwallader, “Informant Led Way.”
Stephens and Cadwallader, “Informant Led Way.”
“United States v. Kessler, 338 F. Supp. 420 (S.D. Ohio 1972); Justia Law, February 16, 1972,

"Brittany Builders Articles of Incorporation,’ May 1967,
https://bizimage.ohiosos.gov/api/image/pdf/B507 _0111; “Joseph Eisenberg Obituary,’ Ohio
Jewish Chronicle, April 12, 1984,

Bruce Cadwallader, “Tangle of Deaths Hangs Over Past of Berry Kessler - Arrest Sends Police
Back to Files,’ Columbus Dispatch, September 20, 1993, p. 01B.

Cadwallader, “Tangle of Deaths.’

Cadwallader, “Tangle of Deaths.’

Cadwallader, “Tangle of Deaths.’

“25-Year-Old Killing.’

Bob Fitrakis, “The Shapiro Murder File,” Free Press, June 16, 2019,

“25-Year-Old Killing.”
Fitrakis, “Shapiro Murder File”
“Complete Shapiro Murder File ” (Columbus Police Department, 1991),

“Complete Shapiro Murder File”
“CEO Jack Kessler: Local Visionary: It’s How You Treat People,’ Columbus Dispatch, August 24,

visionary/23336557007/.
Baumgold, “Bachelor Billionaire?’
“JAS Liquidation Trade Name Registration” (State of Ohio, December 10, 1987),

“First Intercontinental Realty Corporation Articles of Incorporation” (State of Ohio, May 21,
1987), https://bizimage.ohiosos.gov/api/image/pdf/G158 0867.
Landon Thomas Jr, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,’ New York

Epstein Affidavit” (State of Ohio, December 21, 1990), https://unlimitedhangout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2021/08/H043_1630.pdf.

“PFI Leasing Appointment of Agent” (State of Ohio, December 6, 1990),

111
112
113

114
115

116

117

118

119

120
121
122
123
124
125

126

127
128

129

130

131
132

Fitrakis, “Shapiro Murder File.”
Thomas, “International Moneyman.”

Mary Hanbury, “Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Lived the Life of a Billionaire Thanks to Hand-Me-
Downs from Victoria’s Secret Head Les Wexner,’ Business Insider, July 26, 2019,

2019-7.

Fitrakis, “Shapiro Murder File.”

Steve Wright, “Not Everyone Favors New Albany Area Land Trade,’ Columbus Dispatch,
February 1, 1994, p. 07C.

Stamatios Tsigos and Kevin Daly, The Wealth of the Elite: Toward a New Gilded Age (Singapore:
Springer Singapore, 2020), 147.

Moldea, Interference, 288-89; Anthony Marro, “Emprise Corp, Loses Plea for U.S. Pardon,’ New
York Times, September 29, 1977,

sports-conglomerate.html.

Gary W. Diedrichs, “Edward J. DeBartolo: The Pharaoh From Youngstown,’ Cleveland
Magazine, July 1, 1976, https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/edward-
j-debartolo-the-pharaoh-from-youngstown.

Nancy Rivera Brooks and Denise Gellene, “Wexner, DeBartolo: Hard Workers Who Don't Like
to Lose,’ Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1986-11-26-fi-15458-story.html.

Moldea, Interference, 352.

Moldea, Interference, 352.

Moldea, Interference, 352.

Moldea, Interference, 294.

Moldea, Interference, 294.

“Debts Lead to a Bank Takeover,” New York Times, February 13, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/13/business/debts-lead-to-a-bank-takeover.html.

AP, “Tampa Bank Indictments,” New York Times, August 17, 1983,
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/1 7/business/tampa-bank-indictments.html.

Moldea, Interference, 286.

Moldea, Interference, 290; AP, “FBI Criticizes Ex-Prosecutor Over Parole For Mobster,’
Cleveland 19 News, July 12, 2002, https://www.cleveland19.com/story/854621/fbi-criticizes-
ex-prosecutor-over-parole-for-mobster.

AP, “Trump Pardons Former 49ers Owner DeBartolo,’ ESPN, February 18, 2020,

owneredward-debartolo-jr.

“Trucker Charged with Paying off Teamsters Local,’ UPI, May 16, 1988,
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/05/16/Trucker-charged-with-paying-off-Teamsters-
local/2051579758400/.

“Trucker Charged.”

Steven Greenhouse, “Teamsters Accuse Top Union Official of Scheming With Organized
Crime,’ New York Times, January 25, 2003,

scheming-with-organized-crime.html.
133 Greenhouse, “Teamsters Accuse Top Union Official.”

134 Emily Steel et al., “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria's Secret for
Wealth and Women,’ New York Times, July 26, 2019,

secret.html.

135 Gabriel Sherman, “The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long
Relationship With His Biggest Client,” Vanity Fair, June 8, 2021,

relationship-with-his-biggest-client.

136 “Robert A Meister Bio,’ Kando, https://kando.tech/person/robert-meister; “Alexander &
Alexander Services Inc. - Company Profle,” Reference for Business,
https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/55/Alexander-Alexander-Services-Inc.html.

137 “Alexander & Alexander Services Inc”

138 “Alexander & Alexander Services Inc.’

139 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

140 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

141 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

142 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

143 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

144 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

145 Emily Steel et al., “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria's Secret.”
146 Emily Steel et al., “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria's Secret.”
147 Sherman, “Mogul and the Monster.’

148 Emily Steel et al., “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria's Secret.’
149 Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,’ Vanity Fair, March 1, 2003,

CHAPTER 14

THE DARK SIDE OF WEXNER’S
“PHILANTHROPY”

WEXNER AND HIS “DYBBUK”

he year of Arthur Shapiro's murder was also the year that Leslie Wexner

became a billionaire and began to build up his public persona. This began
with a series of fawning media profiles, which Wexner may have sought out on the
advice of his mentor Max Fisher. Fisher, after all, viewed his pristine public image,
which was arguably divorced from reality in key ways, as one of his greatest assets.
Wexner's first main, personal PR campaigns were written by prominent New York
City-based outlets, like New York Magazine and the New York Times.

The New York Magazine profile, which was the cover story for its August S,
1985 issue, was entitled “The Bachelor Billionaire: On Pins and Needles with
Leslie Wexner.”* Though filled with photos of a middle-aged Wexner grinning and
embracing friends as well as lavish praise for his business dealings and his “tender”
and “gentle” personality, one of the main themes of the article revolves around
what is apparently a spiritual affliction or mental illness of Wexner’s, depending on
the reader’s own spiritual persuasion.

The New York Magazine article opens as follows:

On the morning Leslie Wexner became a billionaire, he woke up worried, but this was not
unusual. He always wakes up worried because of his dybbuk, which pokes and prods and gives
him the itchiness of the soul that he calls shpilkes [“pins” in Yiddish]. Sometimes he runs away
from it on the roads of Columbus, or drives away from it in one of his Porsches, or flies from it in
one of his planes, but then it is back, with his first coffee, his first meeting, nudging at him.

One may interpret this use of shpilkes, literally “pins” or “spikes” in Yiddish
and often used to describe nervous energy, impatience or anxiety, as Wexner
merely personifying his anxiety. However, his decision to use the word dybbuk,
which he does throughout the article, is quite significant. Also notable is how
Wexner goes on to describe this apparent entity throughout the article and his
intimate relationship with it.

As defined by Encyclopedia Britannica, a dybbuk is a Jewish folklore term for
“a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until
it finds a haven in the body of a living person”? Unlike spirits that have yet to
move on but possess positive qualities, such as the maggid or ibbur, the dybbuk is
almost always considered to be malicious, which leads it to be translated in
English as “demon.” This was also the case in this New York Magazine profile on

Wexner. Indeed, the author of that article, Julie Baumgold, describes Leslie
Wexner’s dybbuk as “the demon that always wakes up in the morning with Wexner
and tweaks and pulls at him.”

Wexner could have easily chosen to frame the entity as a righteous spirit
(maggid) or as his righteous ancestors (ibbur) guiding his life and business
decisions, especially for the purpose of an interview that would be read widely
throughout the country. Instead, Wexner chose this particular term, which says a
lot for a man who has since used his billions to shape both mainstream Jewish
identity and leadership in both the US and Israel for decades.

As the article continues, it states that Wexner has been with the dybbuk since
he was a boy and that his father had recognized it, and referred to it as the
“churning.” Per Wexner, the dybbuk causes him to feel “molten” and constantly
pricked by “spiritual pins and needles.” It apparently left him at some point only to
return in 1977 when he was 40, half-frozen during an ill-fated trip up a mountain
near his vacation home in Vail, Colorado. This specific trip is when Wexner says he
both rejoined with his childhood dybbuk and decided to “change his life.”

He told New York Magazine that his dybbuk makes him “wander from house
to house,’ “wanting more and more” and “swallowing companies larger than his
own.” In other words, it compels him to accumulate more money and more power
with no end in sight. Wexner later describes the dybbuk as an integral “part of his
genius.’

Wexner further describes his dybbuk as keeping “him out of balance,
emotionally stunted, a part of him — the precious, treasured boy-son part — lagging
behind [the dybbuk].’ This is consistent with other definitions of the term in
Jewish media, including a feature piece published in the Jewish Chronicle. That
article first defines the term as “a demon [that] clings to [a person’s] soul” and
then states that: “The Hebrew verb from which the word dybbuk is derived is also
used to describe the cleaving of a pious soul to God. The two states are mirror
images of each other.” Per Wexner’s word choice and his characterization of what
he perceives as an entity dwelling within him, the entity — the dybbuk - is
dominant while his actual self and soul “lags behind” and is stunted, causing him
to identify more with the entity than with himself.

This is also reflected in the concluding paragraph of the New York Magazine
article:

Les Wexner picks up his heavy black case and flies off in his Challenger, with his dybbuk sitting
next to him, taunting and poking him with impatience, that little demon he really loves. The
dybbuk turns his face. What does he look like? “Me,” says Leslie Wexner.

Outside of the spiritual aspect of this discussion, it can also be surmised from
the above that there is a strong possibility that Wexner suffers from some sort of
mental disorder that causes him to exhibit two distinct personalities which
continuously battle within him. What is astounding is that he describes this
apparent affliction to a prominent media outlet with pride and the author of the
piece weaves Wexner’ “demon” throughout a piece that seeks to praise his
business acumen above all else.

Yet, perhaps the most troubling aspect of Wexner’ experience with his
“dybbuk,” whether real or imagined, is the fact that Wexner, in the years before
and after this article was published, has had a massive impact on Jewish
communities in the US and beyond through his “philanthropy.’ Some of those
philanthropic efforts, like the Wexner Foundation, saw Wexner help mold
generations of Jewish leaders through Wexner Foundation programs while others,
such as the Mega Group, the organized crime-linked Leslie Wexner joined by
several other like-minded billionaires, many of which also boast considerable
organized crime connections, in an effort to shape the relationship of the
American Jewish community, as well as the US government, to the state of Israel.

For a man of such influence in the Jewish community, why has there been
essentially no questions raised as to Wexner’s role in directing the affairs of that
ethno-religious community given that he has openly claimed to be guided by a

“dybbuk”?

THE ORIGINS OF THE WEXNER FOUNDATION

I is hard to know exactly when the Wexner Foundation was originally created.

The official website for the foundation states clearly in one section that the
Wexner Foundation was first set up in 1983 alongside the Wexner Heritage
Foundation.* However, the 2001 obituary of Wexner’s mother, Bella, states that
she and her son created the foundation together in 1973.2 Regardless of the exact
year, Wexner’s mother, Bella, became the secretary of the foundation (just as she
had with his company The Limited), which Wexner wanted people to refer to as a
“joint philanthropy.’

The foundations website states that the original purpose of the Wexner
Foundation was to assist “emerging professional Jewish leaders in North America
and mid-career public officials in Israel” Per the website, Wexner’s main
philanthropic endeavors were created after Wexner “reached the conclusion that
what the Jewish people needed most at that moment was stronger leadership.” As
a result, Wexner sought to focus his foundation’s attention chiefly on the
“development of leaders.” As a consequence of this, Wexner’s programs have
molded the minds and opinions of prominent North American, as well as Israeli,
Jewish leaders who went on to work at the top levels of finance, government and,
even, intelligence.

One of the Wexner Foundation’s original advisors, and perhaps one of the
most important, was Robert Hiller, who had previously been executive vice
president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Robert I.
Hiller was described in an article in the Baltimore Sun as a “nonprofit leader who
helped develop community fundraising strategies and was active in the Soviet
Jewry movement.” As well as being known as a community development leader,
Hiller was also an executive with Community Chest of Metropolitan Detroit in
1948. In that position, Hiller helped bring together corporations such as General
Motors to create “social service groups under an umbrella organization, a
precursor to collective fundraising efforts today” In 1950, Hiller became the
associate director of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and six years
later he also joined the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. He would spend
another nine years in that position before his move to Baltimore.

In his autobiography, Hiller wrote about his extensive dealings with various
Israeli heads-of-states, saying: “I had pictures of every Israeli Prime Minister from
David Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin. I would have many more with Begin
because he was the current Prime Minister. My favorite picture, however, (it was
to be hung) was taken in Washington, D.C. at a gala party where Marianne and I
were with the then Ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and his wife, Leah.”

Hiller was extremely proactive when it came to seeding suitable, high ranking
candidates for appropriate positions in Jewish community organizations, a task
that the Wexner Foundation would later reproduce on a grand scale via its various
Fellowship programs and apply to the world of business and government. One
example of this matchmaking was the appointment of Larry Moses as assistant to
Rabbi Maurice Corson. Corson is credited as co-founding the Wexner
Foundation with Leslie Wexner in 1983, per the foundation's website, and served
as its first president. After Corson left that post, Moses stepped in to serve as the
foundation's president.

Hiller wrote in his autobiography that he had “personally enticed” Moses to
become Rabbi Corson’ assistant and this later resulted in Larry Moses becoming
the executive vice president of the Wexner Foundation.2 When Hiller was 33
years-old, he was presented with an opportunity to become a member of the Big
16, which was classed as an informal grouping of the 16 largest communities in
North America headed by prominent Jewish executive members. One of the
people who Hiller connected with the Wexner Foundation was originally meant
to lead the Big 16 Federation, Fern Katelman. Katelman declined this prestigious
leadership role in order to join Larry Moses, where he became his assistant at the
Wexner Foundation."2

Hiller, when revisiting his life, would state: “One of the most stimulating
relationships I had was with the Wexner (Leslie) Foundation of Columbus, Ohio,
and New York City. Rabbi Maurice Corson was the foundation president. My
relationship with him started in Baltimore where he had been a new rabbi for one
of the city’s largest Conservative synagogues. He came from Philadelphia with an
interesting background and credentials.’

Hiller goes on to write: “He [Corson], however, seemed bored and uneasy
with the routine of being a synagogue rabbi. When he and the congregation
decided to part company, I assisted in getting him an executive position with the
United Israel Appeal of Canada. He did so well that he was recruited to return to

the U.S.A. in an executive position with International B’nai B'rith. Leslie Wexner
met him through his work with B'nai B'rith, and when Les began to put together a
formal foundation, he engaged Rabbi Corson as the chief executive” B'nai
Brith, the “Jewish fraternal organization” modeled as a secret society, was
previously discussed in chapter 10.

Hiller went on to assist Corson in the initial stages of setting up the Wexner
Foundation while they put together “a distinguished advisory group” with the
group meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Hiller describes assisting
Corson in creating the foundation, which Hiller called: “an unusual foundation
with its own agenda and programming.” After several years of service to the
Wexner Foundation, Hiller retired from his consultancy role and was replaced by
Philip Bernstein, the former executive of the Council of Jewish Federations and
Welfare Funds (CJF).

Now, it makes sense to examine Rabbi Maurice S. Corson himself. Corson
was a prominent Jewish educator who, as previously mentioned, already had
associations with various Jewish welfare organizations prior to serving as co-
founder and then president of the Wexner Foundation. Corson had been ordained
as a rabbi in 1960 through the Jewish Theological Seminary, after previously
studying at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated in 1955. By 1964,
Corson had become the president of the Religious Education Society in Seattle,
and he remained in that position until 1966.

Over the following decade, he began working for the Zionist Organization
America in Atlantic City and, shortly thereafter, became the Senior Rabbi at the
Chizuk Amuna Congregation, a position he held from 1976 until 1979. Around
this time, Hiller helped Corson get an executive position with the United Israel
Appeal of Canada, where he went on to work for only a year before joining B’nai
Brith.

Once recruited into serving a leadership role within the influential “secret
society,’ Corson worked as director of development for B’nai B'rith International,
based in New York City, between 1980 until 1985. During this very period, as
noted in chapters 3,10 and 13, the board of overseers of B’nai B'rith included
Edmond Safra, Edgar Bronfman, and Max Fisher.

As noted previously, while Corson was at B’nai Brith, he first met Leslie
Wexner, who persuaded him to co-found the Wexner Foundation (per the version
of events on the foundation's website). Although he had been recruited by Wexner

and subsequently left the B’nai Brith organization, Corson became a member of
the executive committee of B’nai B'rith Hillel Commission in Washington in 1987.

Another important player, mentioned in Hiller’s autobiography as being on
the original advisory board of the Wexner Foundation, is Charles S. Liebman.
Born in New York City in 1934, Liebman was an influential Jewish political
scientist who spent most of his career teaching at Bar-Ilan University. He was born
to a self-described “Zionist family” and, by 1965, Liebman had published his
seminal work, “Orthodoxy in American Life,” in the American Jewish Year Book.15
The paper, often referred to as Liebman’s “pioneering essay,’ received critical
acclaim among the American Jewish community.

In 1983, the year that Wexner Foundation was ostensibly created, Liebman
was preparing to publish his most controversial work, “Extremism as a Religious
Norm.” In this paper Liebman analyzed religious extremism in Israel and argued
that: “religious extremism is the norm and that it is not religious extremism but
religious moderation that requires explanation.” In this paper, Liebman explains:
“Since religious commitment is a total commitment, and the behavior it elicits is
by definition moral behavior, religious adherence becomes a criterion by which
other people can be evaluated. The religiously committed individual will
experience moral repugnance in associating with the non-religious.”

Liebman’ss paper was criticized by those who saw it as an attempt to excuse
and justify extremism within Israel. John Cumpsty, for instance, responded to this
particular work of Liebman’s in a 1985 piece entitled: “Glutton, Gourmet or Bon
Vivant: A response to Charles S. Liebman,’ calling Liebman’s essay “an attempt at
methodological generalization” and “quite extraordinarily reductionist” +

Liebman’s subsequent works were never as controversial as Extremism as a
Religious Norm, and he was later lauded as “the preeminent social scientist of
Jews and Judaism in the latter third of the 20th century?”!® In March 2003,
Liebman was awarded the Israel Prize, for government studies and then, in
September of that same year, he passed away.

Another key figure who is important to mention is the co-founder of the
Wexner Heritage Foundation, Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman. Depending on which
part of the Wexner Foundation site you visit, that Foundation is listed as having
been founded in either 1983 or 1985. However, Friedman is clearly listed as the
co-founder of the foundation and as having served as its president for a decade.+®

The Wexner Heritage Foundation, per its website, was created “to strengthen
volunteer leaders in the North American Jewish Community.’ It spawned the
Wexner Heritage program, which “provides young North American Jewish
volunteer leaders with a two-year intensive Jewish learning program, deepening
their understanding of Jewish history, values, and texts and enriching their
leadership skills”?

Friedman was a US Army chaplain during World War II and also served as an
“adviser on Jewish affairs to General Lucius D. Clay, the commander of American
occupation forces in Germany.’ He was later personally recruited by David Ben-
Gurion, who went on to serve as Israel’s first Prime Minister, to join the
paramilitary group, the Haganah. As noted in chapter 3, the Haganah was the pre-
cursor to the Israeli military and was armed in large part by organized crime-
linked networks. Per the New York Times, “as a member of the Haganah, Rabbi
Friedman participated in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal transport of European Jews to
Palestine”

From 1954 to 1971, Friedman was the chief executive of the United Jewish
Appeal (UJA) and, in that role “raised more than $3 billion to support the
fledgling state of Israel”?? During this period, UJA was intimately involved in the
relaunching of the Jewish Agency by Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher in 1970. As
noted in the previous chapter, Fisher was also intimately involved with the UJA as
well as the related United Israel Appeal. Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was “one
of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America”
and, after creating the Wexner Heritage Foundation with Friedman, Wexner
became UJA’s vice chairman.

While Wexner was serving in these capacities, he was also engaged in closed
door meetings with the highest levels of Israeli leadership, not just about
“philanthropy,” but also about his business interests. One specific meeting saw
him meet with top Israeli government officials about “Chinese and Israeli
interests” working with his company, The Limited, to establish factories in the
occupied Golan Heights.”

Notably, the Wexner Foundation has direct and controversial ties to at least
one former Israeli head of state, Ehud Barak, who — as previously mentioned in
chapter 12 — was intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein. As reported by Israel
Today in 2019:

[Barak’s ties to the Wexner Foundation] became an issue only after right-wing
journalist Erel Segal called last October to investigate the $2.3 million “research”
grant Barak received from the Wexner Foundation, which has in turn for years
been the beneficiary of Epstein’s financial contributions. According to Segal, the
grant under question was given to Barak in 2004-2006, when he held no public
position. Barak insists he has no authority to disclose details about this grant.
Only the Wexner Foundation can, if they so choose (they choose silence).7°

DEVELOPING LEADERS

Se up simultaneously alongside the Wexner Foundation, Wexner’s Heritage
Program (WHP) planned to connect American Jews with the ever expanding
nation-state of Israel. The program was created so as to “expand the vision of
Jewish volunteer leaders, deepen their Jewish knowledge and confidence and
inspire them to exercise transformative leadership in the Jewish community.”2°
The foundation defines the program as: “essentially a Jewish learning and
leadership development program for volunteer leaders in North America.”

There have been, to date, around 2000 “leaders” who have taken part in the
program. The WHP is a vehicle for standardizing a certain perspective on the
history of Israel, as well as Judaic texts. The two year program is made up of 36
evening seminars, which occur bi-monthly for four-hour periods, as well as three
short-term and out-of-town summer institutes hosted in either the US or Israel.
Each of these summer institutes are between 5 and 7 days long and take place
throughout the program.

As with other well-founded leadership programs, such as the World Economic
Forum's Young Global Leader program, the Wexner Heritage Program targets a
very specific age group, aiming at professionals who are generally between the
ages of 30 and 45 years-old. Some of the most important criteria required of
program participants include showing a demonstrated commitment to Judaism,
the Jewish community and/or Israel and a track record of leadership in Jewish
communal life.

The Wexner Foundation website claims that:

The 2,300 Alumni of the Wexner Heritage Program are top lay leaders at the local, national and
international level. In the 35 cities where we have convened WHP cohorts, virtually every
Jewish communal organization continues to be supported by our alumni. They become
presidents or chairs of synagogues, Federations, JCC’s, Hillels, day schools, camps and more;
they often are founders or chairs of allocations or annual campaigns. They serve on the boards of
JFNA, 70 Faces Media, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, International Hillel, AIPAC and J
Street; The Shalom Hartman Institute, Pardes, Hadar and every US rabbinical seminary; the
Jewish Education Project, Prisma, the JDC and so many more.

It is worth noting that, of those aforementioned groups, the Wexner
Foundation (and especially the Wexner Heritage program) enjoys particularly
close ties to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). For instance,

Elliot Brandt, AIPAC’s national managing director, is an alumnus of the Wexner
Heritage Program and, in a 2018 speech at that year’s AIPAC policy conference,
Brandt noted that “most of the [AIPAC] National Board consists of Wexner
Heritage Alumni, not to mention its regional chairs and some of its most
committed donors as well”?

Wexner’s close ties to AIPAC take on a different tone when one considers, not
only his close association with the Israeli intelligence-connected Jeffrey Epstein,
but also the fact that AIPAC itself has long-standing and controversial ties to
Israeli intelligence. For instance, AIPAC was at the center of an Israeli espionage
scandal in the US in the mid-1980s as well as again in 2004, when a high-ranking
Pentagon analyst was caught passing highly classified information over to Israel's
government via top officials at AIPAC.*8

Despite extensive evidence, particularly in the latter case, AIPAC itself
avoided charges. As journalist Grant Smith noted at the time, “the Department of
Justice’s chief prosecutor on the [AIPAC] espionage case, Paul McNulty, was
suddenly and inexplicably promoted within the DOJ after he backed off on

criminally indicting AIPAC as a corporation.’

The charges against the specific
AIPAC officials involved were also dropped.

In the years after the Wexner Heritage Program was launched, other similar
efforts followed. In 1987, the Wexner Foundation announced it would begin
channeling “$3-$4 million in grants to the first year of a program dedicated to the
enhancement and improvement of professional leadership in the North American
Jewish community.”

Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Wexner said an Advisory Group drawn
from among leading Jewish academicians and communal professionals
recommended that attention be focused on three critical groups: rabbis,
communal professionals and educators.” These efforts would result in the formal
creation of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship in 1988. Chairmanship of the
Wexner Fellowship Committee was given to Professor Henry Rosovsky.

HENRY AND HARVARD

He Rosovsky was an economist at Harvard University. Like Wexner, and

like many other of the Wexner Foundation’s associates, Rosovsky was born
to Russian Jewish parents. He grew up speaking Russian, German, and French
and, in 1940, Rosovsky emigrated to the United States of America with his
parents.

During World War II, he served in Counterintelligence Corps of the US
Army. He became a naturalized US citizen 9 years later. That same year, he
received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg,
Virginia, followed by his PhD from Harvard in 1959.

Rosovsky taught overseas as a visiting professor in Japan at Hito Subashi and
Tokyo Universities, and subsequently taught Japanese studies, economics and
history at the University of California at Berkeley until 1965.** He also taught at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, again as a visiting professor, as well
as working as a consultant with the United States government, the Asian
Development Bank, the World Bank, and UNESCO.2=

Rosovsky settled down into his eventual career at Harvard in 1965 and
brought with him the intention of making Jewish life at Harvard flourish. By 1978,
Rosovsky had helped to establish the Center for Jewish Studies, which was led by
Harry Wolfson, the first chairman of a Judaic studies center at any American
college. Rosovsky was the first Jew to serve on the board of the Harvard
Corporation. Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza Rosovsky, also had a presence at Harvard,
and in 1986, during Harvard’s 350th anniversary celebrations, she wrote a piece
entitled “The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe,’ which traces the
Jewish history at the university dating back to the 1720s.2°

Rosovsky developed a close relationship with some key faculty members at
Harvard, including future US Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry
Summers. In 2017, Summers stated in a video tribute to Rosovsky the following:
“Thirty-five years ago, I sat in your office as a young recruit to the Harvard faculty,
and I was trembling with the majesty of it all,” he said. “Over time I became less
intimidated and came to value your wisdom and your experience.”

Rosovsky became involved with the Wexner Foundation in 1987, when the
Wexner Foundation announced the aforementioned initiative to recruit, support,

and retain “the highest quality professional leadership” in the American Jewish
community through grant-making to individuals and institutions. Those
individual grants were awarded as Wexner Foundation fellowships and the
Foundation appointed Rosovsky to serve as the chairman of the Wexner
Fellowship Committee.*8

Rosovsky was prominent and well-connected by the time Wexner approached
him, with his connections including Israeli politicians and heads of state like
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin.“ By this point, Rosovsky was also being
publicly honored for his many achievements. In 1987, after Wexner had launched
several of his philanthropic endeavors, the American Academy of Achievement — a
non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving
individuals in the country — had awarded Rosovsky its “Golden Plate Award.”42

One of Rosovsky’s most important links that were likely of interest to Wexner
was his strong connection with Harvard Hillel. What is today referred to as the
“Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel,’ the Harvard Hillel is commonly described as a service
organization that provides Jewish educational, cultural, religious, and social
opportunities for students and faculty. Rosovsky had been a key player in paving
the way for Hillel’s relocation from a simple home at the outskirts of campus to a
location at the heart of Harvard life. Wexner’s subsequent involvement with
Harvard Hillel would also mark Epstein’s own entry into what would become his
controversial, and intimate, relationship with the prestigious university.

According to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson on Epstein’s donations to
the University, Rosovsky was not only one of Epstein’s closest associates at
Harvard, but was also Epsteins “oldest friend of the bunch,’ having been
introduced to Rosovsky by Wexner around 1991. That is notably the same year
that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell began their sexual blackmail/sex trafficking
operation.

1991 was also the year that the New York Times reported that four donors,
among them Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, had pledged to raise $2 million for
the construction of the new student center of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. In that
article, the Times lists Epstein as the “president of Wexner Investment
Company.’ The building was completed in 1994 and named Rosovsky Hall in
Henry Rosovsky’s honor. Rosovsky Hall is a 19,500-square-foot building, which
cost $3 million to complete and includes a garden courtyard, a student lounge, a

dining hall, a library, offices, and multi-purpose rooms for worship and
meetings.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Hillel executive director Rabbi Jonah Steinberg
claimed that Epstein had merely “facilitated” a gift that was actually donated by
the Wexners and did not involve Epstein’s personal money. However, a now-
absent plaque on the building, cited by the Harvard Crimson in 2003, named
both Epstein and Wexner as donors responsible for funding the center's
construction.

Steinberg did note that Epstein did donate $50,000 to Hillel in 1991, the same
year that the gift for the construction of Rosovsky Hall was also made. The
following year, records from Harvard's Office of Alumni Affairs and Development
reveal that Epstein was courted as a potential donor by the University, with
Harvard's “most senior leaders” first officially meeting with Epstein to “seek his
support.’** It is unclear exactly what resulted from this meeting, as Epstein’s first
official donation to Harvard was recorded in 1998, raising the possibility that
support could have been given in other ways that did not necessarily involve direct
donations to the University.

Indeed, when Harvard moved to reject donations from Epstein following his
2008 conviction, Epstein continued to donate indirectly to the University by
directly sponsoring several professors as well as a student social club at Harvard.
Epstein may have contributed in this fashion during this earlier period, especially
given that he had already donated to Harvard's Hillel by the time of the 1992
meeting.

It is worth noting that Epstein’s first “official” donation to Harvard in 1998 was
the same year he was using his private plane, now best known to the public as the
“Lolita Express,’ to transport then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence “Larry”
Summers. As will be noted in chapter 16, Summer’s then-boss, Treasury Secretary
Richard Rubin, had previously facilitated Epstein’s first official visit to the Clinton
White House in early 1993. Summers would become president of Harvard
University shortly after the conclusion of the Clinton administration, in July 2001.
During Summer's tenure, Epstein’s access to Harvard’s campus and many of its
most notable professors increased exponentially. While president of Harvard,
Summers continued to fly on Epstein’s plane.

DEVELOPING YOUNG GLOBAL LEADERS

hough Epstein’s ties to Harvard have been scrutinized, Wexner also

dramatically expanded his donations to Harvard during much of the same
period. However, the role this may have played in facilitating Epstein'’s own
connections to the university have been largely glossed over by mainstream media
reports on the matter.

Even before Wexner and Epstein donated to Harvard’s Hillel in 1991,
Wexner’s philanthropic “development of leaders” had become entangled with
Harvard University. In 1989, the year after the Wexner Graduate Fellowship was
launched, the Wexner Israel Fellowship program was created to specifically
“support up to 10 outstanding Israeli public officials earning their Mid-Career
Master of Public Administration (MC/MPA) at Harvard Kennedy School.”

Per the Wexner Foundation’s website: “The goal of the Fellowship is to
provide Israel’s next generation of public leaders with advanced leadership and
public management training. More than 280 Israeli public officials have
participated in the Israel Fellowship, including leaders who have gone on to
become Directors General of government ministries, Generals and Commanders
in the Israeli military, and top advisers to Prime Ministers.’ As part of the program,
participants “meet with senior U.S. government officials.”“° Wexner Israel Fellows
also “commit to returning to Israel and remaining in the public sector for at least
three years after completing the program.”

Similar claims can be found among Israeli media. For example, Israel 21c
stated the following about the program in 2002:

Several Wexner graduates have gone on to become Director-Generals of government ministries.
Others have reached the highest echelons of the military, the health service, and the educational
establishment. But ultimately, for Israel, the value of the program is not the titles of its

participants, but in the quality of leadership exercised by these individuals at every level 42

That same article also notes that Wexner’s interest in having this program be
hosted at Harvard’s Kennedy school “is the quality of the international exposure it
permits. It attracts the highest caliber of public sector leadership from around the
world and Israeli participants find themselves sitting next to ex-presidents and
future prime ministers from every continent. It also creates a rare opportunity for

high quality public relations, as future world leaders are exposed to some of the
finest and most dedicated individuals Israel has to offer.”48

Among the 10 alumni of the first class of Wexner Israel Fellows is Shay Avital,
a prominent leadership figure in the Israeli military and who had first served
under Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu. Other alumni
include Avinoam Armoni, former special adviser to Teddy Kollek (see chapter 3),

50 Moshe Lador, former ae state

as well as fics prime ministers;
prosecutor;=+ Arik Raz, former governor of Israel's Misgav region;-2 Uzi
Vogelman, current justice on Israel’s Supreme Court;$ Eduardo Titelman Goren,
a Chilean economist who has o a major role in managing Chile’s copper
mining industry (the world’s largest);* and Yossi Tamir, Director General of the
JDC-Israel, “the leading global Jewish humanitarian organization.’=>

Another interesting alumnus from this first class was Amos Slyper, who was
Deputy Director-General of the State Comptroller’s Office in Israel, making him
responsible for the auditing of Israeli government ministries and offices.*° During
Slyper’s tenure, the legal adviser to that office was Nurit Israeli, an alumnus of the
second class of Wexner Israel Fellows.

As can be seen from just the first class of fellows, the Wexner Israel Fellow
programs and its active alumni community have given Wexner considerable clout
with prominent Israelis in major positions in government and industry. Years after
this program was launched, it has since expanded to include the Wexner Senior
Leaders program, which “leverages the training and scholarship of the Harvard
Kennedy School to strengthen Israel’s public service leadership and spur
innovative, collaborative projects across government departments and agencies?” $Z
It specifically seeks applicants from “senior level positions within Israel’s public
service sector, including the civil service, local government, government agencies,
and security forces” $8

Thus, even before the 1991 donation by Wexner and Epstein, Wexner was
actively bringing prominent Israelis, many with careers in Israel’s national security
apparatus or in the public sector, to study at Harvard’s Kennedy school. In the
years that followed, Wexner would become one of the guiding forces behind this
particular school and would have even greater influence over the “development of
leaders” at the institution.

Shortly before Larry Summers became Harvard's president, Leslie Wexner, via
the Wexner Foundation, funded the creation of the Harvard Kennedy School's

Center for Public Leadership (CPL). The CPL is described as “a premier
training ground for emerging public leaders in the United States.”

The long-time director of CPL, who was likely chosen with direct input from
Wexner, is David Gergen, an adviser to former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan,
and Clinton. In the Nixon years, Gergen was the speechwriter for William E.
Simon, whose ties to Covenant House, AmeriCares, and much more have already
been discussed throughout this book.

Gergen has also had a parallel career in journalism and, in the late 1980s, “he
was chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, working with publisher Mort
Zuckerman.” Zuckerman was a close associate of Epstein and bought the New York
Daily News after the death of its previous owner, Robert Maxwell. Gergen is also a
long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral
Commission, where Epstein also had memberships.

Wexner’s contributions to Harvard’s CPL reached $19.6 million by 2006 and
totaled more than $42 million by 2012. Notably, during this period, Jeffrey
Epstein — one of Wexner’s closest associates until they parted ways between 2007
and 2008 — was also making major connections and gaining unprecedented access
to the school.

In 2006, when the Wexner’s announced an additional donation of $6.8 million
to the CPL, Gergen was quoted by the Harvard Crimson as saying:

It has been a great personal privilege to work with Les and Abigail Wexner over the past half-

dozen years, at the University and beyond. They are both leaders in their own right — people of

vision, imagination, and keen dedication to advancing the quality of public life. They have been
»62

wonderful partners’? =<

In 2014, Gergen participated in the Wexner Foundation’s 30" anniversary
gala, hosting a session where he interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres at length.@

Before Epstein’s second arrest, the Wexner-dominated CPL saw Epstein
associates like Glenn Dubin and Leon Black creep into its top leadership bodies.
For example, Dubin had become a member of CPL’ advisory council, which
Leslie and Abigail Wexner co-chaired. Both Wexner and Dubin were pressured to
remove themselves from that council after Epstein’s second arrest and subsequent
death and departed in February 2020. At the time, the Harvard Crimson noted
that the chief of staff to then-Harvard president Lawrence Bacow, Patricia

Bellinger, had been added to the board of directors of Wexner’s L Brands (the
current corporate name of The Limited).°°

Also at the time, Dubin had been named in court documents as one of the
men Virginia Giuffre was forced to have sex with when she was under Epstein’s
control, with another being Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. In
addition, as noted by the Crimson, a “former manager of the Dubin household
Rinaldo Rizzo recount[ed] his encounter with a 15-year-old girl allegedly
trafficked by Epstein who was brought to the Dubins’ house in 2005.” In 2010,
Dubin had donated $5 million to the CPL to create his own fellowship aimed at
“developing leaders,’ called the Dubin Graduate Fellowships for Emerging
Leaders.

In another example, Leon Black, of Apollo Global Management and whose
“philanthropic” family foundation was also managed by Epstein for years, was on
the CPL’ leadership council. Black, however, did not resign his post after the
Epstein scandal became a national concern. However, after Wexner and Dubin
had left their positions on the advisory council, Black’s connection to Epstein
resulted in considerable media scrutiny as well as an “internal investigation” by
Apollo.®8 As of 2022, Black is no longer listed on the CPL’s website as a member
of its leadership council.

In 2006, plans were made for the Wexner-funded CPL to team up with the
World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) program. The World
Economic Forum, which describes itself as the pre-eminent facilitator of “public-
private partnerships” on a global scale, originally created what would become
YGL in 1992 under the name the Global Leaders of Tomorrow. It was rebranded
as the YGL program in 2004.

In recent years, the Forum and its YGL program have become infamous in
some circles, specifically after a clip of the Forum's chairman Klaus Schwab went
viral. In that clip, Schwab states the following of the YGL program:

I have to say then I mention names like Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on they all
have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud
of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so

on, is that we penetrate the cabinets. ... It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now... z0

Notably, that clip comes from a 2017 discussion between Klaus Schwab and
the CLP’s David Gergen that took place at the Harvard Kennedy school. In the
introduction to that discussion, the close ties between the Harvard Kennedy

school and the World Economic Forum are highlighted and it is also mentioned
that YGL participants are also present and attending the Harvard Kennedy school
for an executive session. Gergen, in addition to his many roles and appointments,
is also formerly a board member of the Schwab Foundation for Social
Entrepreneurship, which Klaus Schwab co-founded with his wife in 1998, and is
also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum.4

The CPL began hosting an Executive Session for Young Global Leader
participants in order to allow “the Young Global Leaders a much greater
opportunity to form personal connections and bonds that will encourage
opportunities for the leaders to working together, across multiple sectors, to solve
international issues and problems in the future”

These executive sessions were “designed and hosted by the Kennedy School of
Government” and a significant amount of the funds raised were connected to the
Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). In 2007, Epstein’s defense lawyers claimed that
Epstein had played a major role in developing the CGI, writing to federal
prosecutors that “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the
Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a
community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to
some of the world’s most pressing challenges”?

At the time, the executive director of the CPL, working under David Gergen,
was Betsy Meyers, a former senior adviser to president Clinton, specifically on
women’s issues. Meyers also played a “critical role in Clinton’s re-election effort in
1996.” The corruption surrounding Clinton's re-election campaign that year and
Epstein’s own connections to that corruption are discussed in chapter 16.4

Klaus Schwab's now infamous “penetrate the cabinets” quote may offer insight
as to Leslie Wexner’s own interest over the decades in “developing leaders” in
American Jewish communities, in Israel and beyond. With nearly 40 years focused
specifically on training men and women of influence in American Jewish society —
as well as in Israel’s government and private sector — ideas and policies that benefit
Wexner both personally and professionally have been instilled into generations of
leaders and influencers, who then go on to influence many others. In the specific
case of the Wexner Israel fellows, Wexner has been able to “penetrate” key posts in
Israel’s government, and even its national security/intelligence apparatus, with
people he has funded and who have participated in courses that were shaped by,
and reflect, Wexner’s views.

Over the past two decades, Wexner’s foray into becoming one of the main
donors of the Harvard Kennedy school allows for much the same to occur, but
this time for leaders who operate and influence those far outside of the boundaries
of the global Jewish community.

Wexner’s exact reasons for establishing and maintaining this legitimate yet
massive influence operation, which paralleled Epstein’s own blackmail-based
influence operation, have never been made explicit.

Yet, in speculating as to why he would want to mold the powerful and soon-
to-be powerful, it is worth considering Wexner’s lesser known connections,
including to organized crime, to Jeffrey Epstein, and (as will be discussed in
chapter 17) to not one but two CIA-linked airlines with histories of drug and arms
trafficking.

THE MEGA GROUP

he same year he and Epstein began donating to Harvard, in 1991, Leslie

Wexner teamed up with Charles Bronfman to establish an exclusive group of
20 of “the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” that is
referred to as either the “Study Group” or the “Mega Group.’ Though it was
created in 1991, no media reports were written about the group until 7 years later,
in 1998, when a short report on the group was published in the Wall Street
Journal. At that time, it was reported that each member of this “loosely
organized club” contributes $30,000 to the group annually and its members meet
twice a year for two days. The official focus of the group is Jewish philanthropy.

However, per the Wall Street Journal’s report, the main concerns about these
billionaires, as it relates to “philanthropy,’ centered around declining support for
Israel's policies and concern that an increasing number of Jews were intermarrying
with other ethno-religious groups. It seems, instead, that many of the Mega
Group’s members were more concerned about using their money and influence to
control Jewish identity. Indeed, one prominent Mega Group member, Michael
Steinhardt, who went on to form Birth-right-Taglit with Charles Bronfman and
with the backing of Benjamin Netanyahu, has long been open that he is an atheist
who thinks that devotion to the State of Israel should serve as “a substitute for
[Jewish] theology”2®

There is reason to speculate as to whether the sole intention of the Mega
Group was focused on philanthropy. The main reason to suspect that ulterior
motives may hide behind the group's “philanthropic” mission is because many of
the group's members, including its founders Wexner and Bronfman, have direct
and indirect ties to organized crime and/or intelligence networks that have been
explored in this book.

Aside from Wexner, Charles Bronfman and his brother Edgar, other Mega
Group members/associates at the time of the Journal's article included Laurence
Tisch, Steven Spielberg, and Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher. Fisher’s ties to the
governments of the US and Israel, their intelligence agencies and an indirect
organized crime connection through his association with the Allen brothers and
others were discussed in the previous chapter. Similar connections of the

Bronfman family and Leslie Wexner himself were mainly discussed in chapter 2
and chapter 13, respectively.

As for Steven Spielberg, the famous director, he is the best known protégé of
Lew Wasserman, the Hollywood mogul of MCA with major organized crime
connections. There is also the case of Lester Crown. As previously noted in
Chapter 1, Lester Crown is the son of the “Supermob” figure, Henry Crown. As
discussed there, Crown's closest associates included Jake Avery, a political fixer for
the Democrats who was allied with Al Capone, and Sidney Korshak, a lawyer
linked to prominent organized figures like Moe Dalitz as well as mob-linked
executives at MCA, including Wasserman.

In the case of Laurence Tisch, his ties to the networks discussed at length in
this book are a bit less direct. He began his career in the OSS, before building a
massive hotel chain. Tisch would subsequently become intimately involved with
Drexel Burnham Lambert and convicted felon Michael Milken. Their relationship
would enable Tisch’s takeover of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

Another case is Michael Steinhardt, a well-known and controversial hedge
fund manager who co-founded Birthright-Taglit with Mega Group co-founder
Charles Bronfman. Birthright-Taglit is managed by the Jewish Agency that Fisher
helped relaunch in 1970 and has also received substantial funding from the
Wexner Foundation.

Steinhardt opened up about his own family ties to Meyer Lansky in his
autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out of the Markets, where he noted that his
father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a
major player in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his
son's first client on Wall Street and helped him jump-start his career in finance.

Such associations are not limited to Steinhardt’s past, however. In 1991,
Steinhardt owned a hedge fund called JGM Management with James Marquez.
Samuel Israel III also worked at the firm and he and Marquez would go on to fund
the Bayou Group, which became one of the “one of the most bizarre hedge fund
blowups” in recent decades.

The fraud that resulted in that “blowup” was directly related to Israel's
relationship to Robert Booth Nichols, the figure deeply tied to organized crime
and intelligence who figured prominently in the PROMIS scandal (See chapter
9). Israel claimed to once have defended Nichols during a “secret trade at a

German bank,’ killing a “Middle Eastern guy” in the process.®2

Other, similar associations can also be found in the earliest stages of
Steinhardt’s career. For decades, Steinhardt was particularly close to Marc Rich,
first meeting the Mossad-linked commodities trader in the 1970s and then
managing $3 million for Rich, Rich’s then-wife Denise, and Rich’s father-in-law
from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s through his hedge fund.*! Rich’s fortune
during this time was “a source of funding for secret financial arrangements” and
that “his worldwide offices, according to several reliable sources, frequently served
Mossad agents, with his consent”?

Rich had more direct ties to the Mossad as well. For instance, his foundation —
the Rich Foundation — was run by the former Mossad agent Avner Azulay. Rich
was also friendly with prominent Israel politicians, including former Prime
Ministers Menachem Begin and Ehud Barak, and was a frequent provider of
“services” for Israeli intelligence, services he freely volunteered.® In addition, as
mentioned in Chapter 7, Rich had a relationship with BCCI and the corrupt bank
lent him tens of millions of dollars throughout the 1980s.°4

In the late 1990s, Steinhardt would enlist other Mega Group members, such
as Edgar Bronfman, in the effort to settle the criminal charges against Rich, which
eventually came to pass with Clinton’s controversial pardon before he left office in
early 2001. Steinhardt claimed to have come up with the idea of a presidential
pardon for Rich in late 2000.85

Rich’s pardon was controversial for several reasons, and many mainstream
outlets asserted that it “reeked of payoff.” As the New York Post noted in 2016, in
the run-up to the presidential pardon the financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated
$450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and “over $1 million to Democratic
campaigns in the Clinton era.”®° In addition, Rich had hired high-powered lawyers
with links to powerful individuals in both the Democratic and Republican parties
as well as the Clinton White House, including Jack Quinn, who had previously
served as general counsel to the Clinton administration and as former chief of staff
to Vice President Al Gore.

Per Clinton’s own words and other supporting evidence, the main reason
behind the Rich pardon was the heavy lobbying from Israeli intelligence, Israeli
politicians, and members of the Mega Group like Steinhardt, with the donations
from Denise Rich and Quinn’s access to the president likely sweetening the deal.©2
Ehud Barak had played a pivotal role in the pardon, reportedly even shouting at
the president to pardon Rich on at least one occasion.®® In early 2019, it was

reported that several women who had worked with Steinhardt at various Jewish
organizations, including Hillel International, had accused him of sexual
harassment.&2

A “MEGA” MYSTERY

Reve a year before the Mega Group was formally reported on by the
ainstream American press, an explosive story was published by the
Washington Post. The story centered on an intercepted phone call made between a
Mossad official in the US and his superior in Tel Aviv that discussed the Mossad’s
efforts to obtain a secret US government document.

According to the Post, the Mossad official stated during the phone call that
“Israeli Ambassador Eliahu Ben Elissar had asked him whether he could obtain a
copy of the letter given to [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat by [then-Secretary of
State Warren] Christopher on Jan. 16, the day after the Hebron Accord was signed
by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.”

The Post article continued:

According to a source who viewed a copy of the NSA transcript of the conversation, the
intelligence officer, speaking in Hebrew, said, “The ambassador wants me to go to Mega to get a
copy of this letter.’ The source said the supervisor in Tel Aviv rejected the request, saying, “This

is not something we use Mega for”20

The leaked communication led to an investigation that sought to identify an
individual code-named “Mega” that the Post said “may be someone in the U.S.
government who has provided information to the Israelis in the past,’ a concern
that subsequently spawned a fruitless FBI investigation.

The Mossad later claimed that “Mega” was merely a code word for the CIA,
but the FBI and NSA were unconvinced by that claim and believed that it was a
senior U.S. government official that had potentially once been involved in working
with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. naval intelligence analyst later convicted of
spying for the Mossad.24

However, the main source for the claim that “Mega” was code for the CIA and
not something else was none other than Rafi Eitan, one of the architects of the
PROMIS scandal and the handler of both Robert Maxwell and Jonathan Pollard
on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Per the Los Angeles Times, Eitan had said that
“Mega” was derived from Megawatt and that name, “[d]uring the “70s and ‘80s, it
was the name of an international gathering of representatives from a dozen
Western intelligence organizations, including the Mossad and CIA, who
exchanged information and assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions.” The

LA Times notes that “Megawatt” had been disbanded long before the 1997 spy
scandal and intercepted phone call. This, of course, suggests that Eitan was seeking
to cover for something else and it is thus unsurprising that neither US intelligence
nor the Clinton administration took his claims at face value.

And why would they? After all, Eitan had been involved in several espionage
operations that targeted sensitive American installations and military secrets. He
also had previously relied on organized crime networks in the US for his
intelligence work, such as when he contacted and met with Meyer Lansky, who
helped him illicitly obtain sensitive electronic equipment from the CIA.

“Mega” was, most likely, some sort of mole in the US power establishment and
this was the belief of US intelligence at the time, per media reports of the period.
However, they had suspected that “Mega” referred to an individual who was
servicing Israeli intelligence the way Jonathan Pollard had. Yet, the subsequent
reporting in the Wall Street Journal, on the “Mega Group” of billionaires deeply
connected, not just to Israel’s power structure, but also to organized crime
networks, suggests that “Mega” could have potentially referred to a group, as
opposed to an individual.

Indeed, when considering that - in the intercepted call - the Mossad
operative planned to “go to Mega” to get a copy of a diplomatic letter, the
possibility isn’t so far-fetched. Max Fisher, a Mega Group member, was an advisor
to several presidential administrations and served as a diplomatic liaison between
the US and Israel, essentially acting as a “private Middle East diplomat” to quote
Bob Fitrakis. In playing that role, Fisher would have likely had access to sensitive
diplomatic documents.

Other Mega Group members were similarly actively involved in both Israeli
and US politics and particularly focused on influencing US foreign policy with
respect to Israel. In addition, as detailed earlier in this chapter, several Mega
members had intelligence connections as well. Would it be so unheard of for these
wealthy figures to have such a document or be able to readily obtain a copy, given
that some of them had a history of acting as de facto diplomats in such matters and
had easy access to major political power centers?

With journalists positing soon after the WSJ article that the Mega Group’s
“charitable interests are often a cover for lobbying activities on behalf of Israel,”
the possibility seems important to consider. This is especially true given that one
of the Mega Group’s co-founders, Leslie Wexner, was employing Jeffrey Epstein,

who was tied to Israeli intelligence and then working closely with Ghislaine
Maxwell in an influence operation that allegedly had a specific focus on targeting
the sitting President of the United States.

Notably, a year after the “Mega” spy scandal, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu
was alleged to have used blackmail against Bill Clinton to gain leverage during the
Wye Plantation talks between Israel and Palestine in 1998. It was later reported by
author Daniel Halper — relying on on-the-record interviews with former officials
and hundreds of pages of documents compiled in the event that Lewinsky took
legal action against Clinton — that Benjamin Netanyahu told Clinton that he had
obtained recordings of sexually-tinged phone conversations between Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky and attempted to use that blackmail to pressure Clinton into
pardoning Jonathan Pollard. Clinton considered the pardon, but only declined
when then-Director of the CIA George Tenet threatened to very publicly resign
his post if the pardon went forward.

Investigative journalist and author Gordon Thomas had made similar claims
years prior and asserted that the Mossad had obtained some 30 hours of phone-
sex conversations between Lewinsky and Clinton and used them as leverage.” In
addition, a report in Insight magazine in May 2000 claimed that Israeli intelligence
had “penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time
conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly
to Israel for listening and recording”

Those phone taps apparently went well beyond the White House, as revealed
by a December 2001 investigative report by Carl Cameron for FOX News.
According to Cameron’s report:

[Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs] helped Bell Atlantic install new telephone lines
in the White House in 1997... [and] a senior-level employee of Amdocs had a separate T1 data
phone line installed from his base outside of St. Louis that was connected directly to Israel...
[I]nvestigators are looking into whether the owner of the T1 line had a “real time” capacity
to intercept phone calls from both the White House and other government offices around
Washington, and sustained the line for some time, sources said. Sources familiar with the
investigation say FBI agents on the case sought an arrest warrant for the St. Louis employee but

[Clinton] Justice Department officials quashed it 28

Amdocs and another Israeli company were also the subjects of similar
reporting from journalist Chris Ketcham:

[Both Amdocs and Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys) ] are based in Israel — having arisen
to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market — and are
heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli
intelligence...

The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies
exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans

for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime).22

The 1990s saw a proliferation of Israeli espionage activity that targeted the
highest levels of government, including the White House. While this wiretapping
for the purpose of blackmail took place, it is important to keep in mind that Jeffrey
Epstein had been visiting the White House, where he allegedly courted the
president and influential White House officials, Congressmen and Senators.

Former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe has alleged that Epstein’s
sexual blackmail operation was created at Israel’s behest specifically to blackmail
president Bill Clinton. Ben-Menashe specifically said the following:

The Israelis feared that Mr. Clinton, when he was campaigning for President, will be a repeat of
Mr. Carter. He wanted to press them for peace with the Palestinians and all that stuff. They
feared ... Clinton wasn’t that ... but they feared he was that.... And I think Mr. Epstein was sent

early on to catch up with President Clinton 122

As previously mentioned in chapter 6, Israel had allegedly been behind the
effort to blackmail president Carter through his brother, Billy Carter. It is also
worth noting again that Epstein’s blackmail operation is believed to have been set
up in 1991, the same year the Mega Group was created by Epstein’s closest
associate Leslie Wexner.

As will be noted in detail in chapter 16, Epstein visited the Clinton White
House 17 times in less than two years. During this period of increased espionage
of the US government by Israel, Epstein’s efforts to court top administration
officials, including the president himself, continued. Other notable politicians
believed to have been blackmailed by Epstein, Democratic politicians Bill
Richardson and George Mitchell, were also notably involved in sensitive Middle
East policy negotiations that were of obvious interest to Israel.

HOLLINGER INTERNATIONAL

EF 1996, Leslie Wexner joined the board of directors of Hollinger International,

a media holding company created by Conrad Black, a now disgraced media
mogul who also makes an appearance in Epstein’s contact book. Black was the son
of prominent Canadian businessman George Montegu Black, Jr., who managed a
division of Argus Corporation called Canadian Breweries.

The Argus Corporation was modeled after the Atlas Corporation, Floyd
Odlum’s company tied to OSS chief William Donovan, as detailed in chapter 1.
According to Argus’s founder E.P. Taylor, after being “introduced to an American,
Floyd Odlum, who had achieved great success with a non-diversified trust called
Atlas Corporation in the states[,] ‘I conceived of modeling Argus after Atlas?” +%

Early on, Atlas had a financial stake in Argus and two directors of Atlas were
initially placed on Argus’s board, one of whom was David Baird, whose CIA-

linked foundation has been a recurring theme in this book.122

Argus was also
connected to defense contractor General Dynamics via Argus director W.E.
Phillips, who was also a director of General Dynamics’s Canadian subsidiary
Canadair Ltd.+® As was also noted in chapter 1, General Dynamics included the
interests of Atlas’s Floyd Odlum as well as the Supermob-linked Henry Crown,
Lester Crown's father.

By the late 1970s, Conrad and his brother controlled the company. Between
1978 and 1985, Conrad Black asset stripped the conglomerate and used the spoils
to build a major Anglo-American media empire, rivaling that of Rupert Murdoch
and Robert Maxwell.

Over the course of 1985, Conrad Black became the controlling shareholder of
the UK’s Daily Telegraph, a newspaper closely aligned with the UK’s conservative
party and Black himself became increasingly associated with Margaret Thatcher.
That same year, he founded Hollinger International as a holding company for his
media interests. A year later, he began aggressively acquiring US media assets, and,
by the time Wexner joined the board, Black, via a Hollinger subsidiary, controlled
393 newspapers in the US alone.+%

Shortly before Wexner joined the board, in 1994, Hollinger’s advisory board
was a hive of people that have been previously mentioned throughout this book,
including: co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski;

journalist and close friend of Roy Cohn, William Buckley; corporate raider and
Clermont Club member, James Goldsmith; and “the Lord Rothschild% Also
present was Chaim Herzog, president of Israel from 1983 to 1993; former Federal
Reserve chairman Paul Volcker; and Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense
for International Planning under Ronald Reagan who was an architect of that
administration's “Star Wars” defense program and, later, an architect of the Iraq
War. Also listed as senior international advisors to Hollinger that year were Henry
Kissinger, who would formally join Hollinger’s board alongside Wexner in 1996,
and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself.

Not long after Wexner joined the board of Hollinger, Conrad Black began to
extensively defraud the company. It was later discovered that, from 1997 to 2004,
Black stole approximately $400 million from the company, “a sum equal to 95
percent of the net profits for the period 1997-2003.” According to reports, Black
had “packed the board of directors with his own nominees, who turned a blind
eye” to his most suspect financial transactions during this period and, as a result,
“not one of these $400 million payments was questioned by his docile board?“
After Wexner joined the board in 1996, he apparently brought his mentor, A.
Alfred Taubman, onto the Hollinger board and, according to David Gross,
Taubman “remained on Hollinger’s board even after he had been convicted of
violating antitrust laws” related to his role at Sotheby’s?~

Though Conrad Black’s financial crimes during Wexner’s time on the board of
Hollinger International are important to note, the proximity of Wexner to Richard
Perle via Hollinger is also significant. A year after Wexner became a director of
Hollinger, in 1997, the company created a new subsidiary called Hollinger Digital
and Hollinger International board member Richard Perle was made CEO.+28

A year prior, Perle had been the co-author, along with prominent neo-
conservatives like Douglas Feith, of a policy document written for then-Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose 1996 electoral victory had been
largely financed and orchestrated by the wealthy heir to the Estee Lauder fortune,
Ronald Lauder. That document, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm,” advocated for the aggressive removal of Iraq's Saddam
Hussein from power and regime change in Syria via proxy war. Journalist Jason
Vest, writing in The Nation, described the document as “a blueprint for a mini-cold
war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes,

destabilization, and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way
to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy? +22

Prior to writing “A Clean Break,’ Perle’s relationship with Israel had been a
source of controversy. According to Seymour Hersh in his book The Price of Power,
Perle was caught via an FBI wiretap in the early 1970s passing classified material
to the Israeli embassy. At the time, Perle was the top foreign policy aide to Senator
Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA).+2 Perle’s close associate, Stephen Bryen, was
subsequently embroiled in a major Israeli espionage scandal in the late 1970s. The
case was closed even though the FBI had recommended the case against Bryen be
brought before an investigative grand jury for espionage." Shortly thereafter, in
1981, Perle secured Bryen a top secret security clearance by hiring him as his
deputy assistant at the Reagan Defense Department. Bryen, throughout the
1980s, continued to pass classified material to Israel on US weapons systems. H2

Upon leaving his job as a Senate aide in 1980, Perle became a consultant with
the Abington Corporation and his first clients were Shlomo and Chaim
Zabludowicz, a father and son team of arms dealers from Israel. During the early
part of this relationship between the Zabludowiczs and Perle, Perle retained his
Senate security clearance and his employer Abington was paid $10,000 a month
by the Zabludowicz’s weapons firm. In 1983, while at the Reagan Defense
Department, Perle had recommended that the Army purchase weapons from one
of the Zabludowicz’s weapons firms. The Zabludowiczs were later alleged to
have benefitted from an improper business relationships with Melvyn Paisley, a
former Navy official. H4

Perle, during the George W. Bush administration, had been appointed to serve
on the Defense Policy Board, where he worked closely with then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In that capacity, Perle “embraced the advantages of
being both a businessman and a policy insider.” * As noted by journalist Daniel
Gross in 2003, “Hollinger is now investigating a $2.5 million investment that
Hollinger Digital made in Trireme Partners, where Perle is a managing partner.
According to the [Financial Times], Perle also directed a $14 million investment
into Hillman Capital, a fund controlled by Gerald Hillman. Gerald Hillman, a
fellow member of the Defense Policy Board, is also a member of Trireme
Partners” H6 Notably, Hollinger-owned media outlets largely acted as cheerleaders

for the Iraq War, which Perle had helped to orchestrate.

WEXNER AND THE WAR

Iso in the year 2003, a document prepared for and financed by the Wexner

Foundation was leaked to the news website Electronic Intifada. The
document, entitled “Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communication Priorities 2003,”
was prepared by the firm led by Republican pollster Frank Luntz and The Israel
Project (TIP). Luntz and TIP co-wrote other similar documents that are intended
for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel” H

This particular Wexner Foundation-funded document was the subject of
controversy upon being made public, as it laid out various “communication
priorities” for Israel's government and pro-Israel partisans as it related to the
American invasion and occupation of Iraq — a war that some analysts believed was
more beneficial to Israeli policy goals than American policy goals in the region.
Former top military officials, like Bush’s former Middle East Envoy and former
head of US Central Command, Anthony Zinni, have explicitly stated that the Iraq
war had been fought for Israel’s benefit and that “pushing the war for Israel’s
benefit was ‘the worst-kept secret in Washington.” H8

The document specifically states that “now is the time to link American
success in dealing with terrorism and dictators from a position of strength to
Israel’s ongoing efforts to eradicate terrorism on and within its borders.” This
document was thus deemed by some journalists as part of “a systematic campaign
to identify Israeli national security interests with U.S. military and security
interests,” a campaign that also intimately involved think tanks deeply tied to the
George W. Bush administration, specifically the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC).+/2 One of the key figures who were both part of PNAC and the
Bush administration, aside from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, was
Hollinger International's Richard Perle.

The Wexner Analysis document shows that the Wexner Foundation was
funding at least one effort directly focused on benefitting Israeli policy goals as
well as on influencing the opinions of the American public with respect to Israeli
foreign policy. While this is the best known example of Wexner’s interests
intermingling with Israeli policy goals as it relates to the Iraq War, it seems there is
more to the story.

On August 31, 2002, Epstein flew to Birmingham, England accompanied only
by an attractive young woman named Nicole Junkermann. Junkermann had
previously worked as a super model represented by Elite Model Management in
1995 — the same modeling agency that Epstein’s friend Naomi Campbell famously
worked for and which Epstein unsuccessfully tried to purchase in the early 2000s.
At the time of this flight, Junkermann had recently graduated from a Harvard
management development program.

From the airport, the pair reportedly traveled by helicopter to the Foxcote
House hunting retreat in the countryside of North Warwickshire, which Abigail
Wexner had purchased in 1999. The next day, on September 1, 2002, Epstein
welcomed two US senators to the property. That evening, the house also hosted a
mix of off-duty Metropolitan Police officers, some private security, as well as a US-
origin security detail present to guard the senators.

A witness of these events, an employee on the premises, later spoke to
journalist Johnny Vedmore and revealed that Epstein met the senators in the
evening accompanied by two ladies, one on each arm. Both ladies — one being an
attractive blonde (presumably Nicole Junkermann) and the other being described
as an unnamed tall brunette — were glamorously dressed and were escorted by
Epstein to the waiting senators.

When a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with UK Metropolitan
Police about the meeting, they said they could “neither confirm nor deny”
providing officers to guard US Senators, nor provide the identity of those senators
due to concerns that included potential harm to “national security” and
“international relations.”

The implications of this are truly staggering as it appears that Epstein may
have used two attractive (though not underage) women to influence two US
Senators at a very critical time in recent US history. Indeed, September 4, 2002 —
just a few days after this UK meeting - was the day that George W. Bush
“launched a campaign to justify to Americans the need to mount a war against
Iraq.” (In launching that campaign, Bush sat next to then-speaker of the House
Dennis Hastert, who notably was later revealed to have sexually abused several
teenage boys while working at a high school prior to his political career.) 2°

In the weeks and months that followed, the effort to take America to war,
based on a series of falsehoods and misinterpretations, grew steadily until the US
formally invaded Iraq in March 2003. Yet, there is now a possibility that Jeffrey

Epstein himself may have played a role in securing support for that war through
the sexual blackmail of sitting US Senators, blackmail ultimately obtained at a
residence owned by the Wexner family.

Endnotes

19
20

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Wexner Foundation, “Our Story.”

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“$6.3 Million to Center.’

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1997-05-18-op-59966-story.html.

Melman, “Pollard Revisited.”

Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal, Mossad: The Great Operations of Israel's Secret Service
(Bitback Publishing, 2015), 119.

Bob Fitrakis, “The Wexner War,’ Free Press, August 1, 2003,
https://freepress.org/article/wexner-war.

Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, “Netanyahu Said to Have Offered Lewinsky Tapes for Pollard,” Times
of Israel, July 23, 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-
lewinsky-tapes-for-pollard/.

Stoil, “Netanyahu.”

Michael J. Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez, “FBI Probes Espionage at Clinton White House,’
Insight on The News, May 29, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20191116045938/https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-
62401780/fbi-probes-espionage-at-clinton-white-house.

“Censored Israeli Software Spying On US Am Docs Comverse Infosys Carl Cameron,” Fox
News, December 2001, https://archive.org/details/CensoredlsraeliSoftwareSpyingOnUSAm-
DocsComverselnfosysCarlCameronDec2001.

Christopher Ketcham, “An Israeli Trojan Horse,’ CounterPunch, September 27, 2008,

Whitney Webb, “Former Israeli Spy Ari Ben-Menashe on Israel's Relationship with Epstein,’
MintPress News, December 13, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben-menashe-is-
rael-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/263465/.

H.T. Seymour, Argus Corporation Limited : A Corporate Background Report (Pitfield, Mackay,
Ross & Company Limited, 1977),
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.873197/publication.html.

“Atlas Corporation has an interest in Argus Corporation Ltd., a new Canadian investment
company,’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 29th, 1945; Roger Gilbert, vice president of
Atlas, was placed on the Argus board when it was launched (Seymour, Argus Corporation,
20); David Baird, closely tied to Odlum and a director of Atlas, was on the board of Argus
(“E.P. Taylor and Group Form ‘Specialized’ Firm,’ National Post (Toronto), November 29,
1945.)

Libbie Park and Frank Park, Anatomy of Big Business (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1973), 169,
https://www.deslibris.ca/ID/413338.

“Hollinger International Inc.” Company Histories, https://www.company-
histories.com/Hollinger-International-Inc-Company-History.html.

“Invitation to the Hollinger Dinner,’ Dole Archives, November 21, 1994,
https://dolearchivecollections.ku.edu/collections/speeches/095/c019 095 011 all.pdf.

106

107

108
109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119
120

Jean Shaoul, “Conrad Black and Hollinger International: A Financial Oligarchy out of Control,”
World Socialist Web Site, September 16, 2004,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/09/holl-s16.html.

Daniel Gross, “Man Overboard,’ Slate, November 20, 2003,
https://slate.com/business/2003/1 1/conrad-black-s-corporate-board-from-hell.html.
“Hollinger International Inc.,’

Jason Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP” The Nation, August 15, 2002,
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/men-jinsa-and-csp/.

Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, 1st ed (New York:
Stephen Green, “Serving Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration,’
CounterPunch.org, September 5, 2006,
https://web.archive.org/web/20060905183335/http://www.counterpunch.org/green022820
04.html.

Green, “Serving Two Flags.”

Jeff Gerth, “PENTAGON AIDE DEFENDS ACTION AIDING EX-CLIENT,’ New York Times, April 18,
1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/18/us/pentagon-aide-defends-action-aiding-ex-
client.html.

Michael Wines, “Arms Inquiry Adds 2 Israeli Concerns,’ New York Times, July 11, 1988,

Paul Krugman, “Citizen Conrad's Friends,’ New York Times, December 23, 2003,
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/opinion/citizen-conrad-s-friends.html.

Gross, “Man Overboard.’

Patrick Cockburn, “Gaza: Secret Report Helps Israelis to Hide Facts,’ The Independent, July 29,
2014, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/israelgaza-conflict-the-secret-
report-that-helps-israelis-to-hide-facts-9630765.html.

Ami Eden and Ori Nir, “Ex-Mideast Envoy Zinni Charges Neocons Pushed Iraq War To Benefit
Israel,’ The Forward, May 28, 2004, https://forward.com/news/5719/ex-mideast-envoy-zinni-
charges-neocons-pushed-iraq/.

Fitrakis, “The Wexner War.’

James Hill, Lee Ferran, and Brian Ross, “Disturbing Details of Dennis Hastert’s Alleged Sex
Abuse Revealed,’ ABC News, April 8, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/disturbing-
details-dennis-hasterts-alleged-sex-abuse-revealed/story?id=38252730.

CHAPTER 15

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: HEIRESS TO
AN ESPIONAGE EMPIRE

DADDY’S GIRL

Be on in life, Ghislaine Maxwell was surrounded by the rich and powerful

figures who frequented her father’s offices as his publishing empire and
political connections grew both in the UK and abroad.+ Her father, Robert
Maxwell, was a dominant force in her life, just as he was for her siblings. Later,
Ghislaine gained a reputation as his favorite child, despite having been neglected
in the earliest years of her life. The neglect, acknowledged by her family members
and Ghislaine herself, was due to the car accident of her eldest brother, Michael
Maxwell, which left him in a coma until he died several years later. The accident
occurred just days after Ghislaine’s birth and its effect on the family led her to be
neglected to such an extent that she developed anorexia as a baby. She reportedly
declared to her mother, Betty Maxwell, “Mummy, I exist” at age 3 in a bid for
attention from one of her parents.*

However, Ghislaine did not escape the abuse that was known to befall Robert
Maxwell’s other children. While brothers Kevin and Ian were well known to
regularly receive tongue lashings from their father in full view of friends and
business associates, Ghislaine received “prearranged hidings [beatings]” from her
father, with a nine-year-old Ghislaine telling author Eleanor Berry, a friend and
confidant of her father’s, that “Daddy has a series of things lined up in a row.
There's a riding crop with a swish to it, another straight riding crop and a few
shoehorns. He always asks me to choose which one I want.”

By all accounts, Robert Maxwell had firm control over young Ghislaine’s life.
This was particularly true when it came to her love life through her teens and into
her time at university, when he reportedly would ban her boyfriends from the
family home and try to keep her from being seen with them publicly. It appears
that Robert Maxwell applied this rule uniquely to Ghislaine and not to his three
older daughters. This may be because he saw Ghislaine, out of all of his children,
as most like himself and sought to develop those shared qualities in his youngest
daughter.

Robert Maxwell was open about viewing Ghislaine this way by the time she
was a young adult, according to British journalist Petronella Wyatt. When
Ghislaine was 21 years old, in 1983, Wyatt, whose father was an advisor to then-
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was introduced to Robert Maxwell by her

mother. Per Wyatt, Maxwell told her mother “What a beautiful daughter you
have,” before adding “I have a beautiful daughter, too. She is just like me.”=

Though such behavior could be attributed merely to his being fatherly, he later
went to great lengths - even involving his publishing empire - to promote
Ghislaine’s affairs with certain individuals, particularly those who inhabited elite
circles (more on that shortly). This behavior suggests that Robert Maxwell may
have seen Ghislaine’s sexuality as a useful tool in growing his influence empire,
beginning when she was quite young. It also may have contributed to Ghislaine’s
willingness, years later, to sexually exploit and abuse the young women she
targeted alongside another man often compared to her father, Jeffrey Epstein.

In much the same way as Ghislaine’s young personal life was controlled by her
father, her entry into the working world after her graduation from Oxford was
directly facilitated and managed by Robert Maxwell, with him setting her up “with
a string of jobs across his business empire.” By 1984, at age 22, she was serving as a
director of the British football club Oxford United alongside her brother Kevin.
At the time, Robert Maxwell held shares in the club through a company created
explicitly for that purpose. He served as the club’s chairman beginning in 1982.

Prior to and during this same period, Ghislaine worked in various roles at her
father’s companies Pergamon Press and the Mirror Group, with British media later
describing her early career as “entirely dependent on her father’s patronage.” She
was working for the Mirror Group by 1984 and possibly earlier. During this
period, Robert often used Ghislaine to market and generally represent his
newspapers publicly.

In 1985, and with Robert Maxwell’s full approval, The People - the Sunday
edition of the Daily Mirror — ran a story claiming that efforts were being made to
blackmail the paper’s publisher, Maxwell himself. The blackmailer had reportedly
threatened Maxwell with information regarding Ghislaine’s alleged relationship
with David Manners, the then-Marquis of Granby and the future Duke of
Rutland. The article sought to paint Robert Maxwell as bravely resisting the
“blackmailer,’ but there is more to the story.

This astonishing article claimed that people connected with the British MP
Harvey Proctor had tried to blackmail Maxwell via The People. The article claimed
that a “sinister phone caller” had warned that, if the newspaper continued its
campaign to expose Harvey Proctor, they would “produce a story about Ghislaine
and Lord Granby at Belvoir Castle with incriminating pictures of them in

compromising positions.” Manners denied the claim, stating that he and Ghislaine
were merely friends.

The bizarre decision to publish a front-page story exploiting his own
daughter's alleged sexual relationship because of an anonymous phone call was
especially odd, given that Robert Maxwell had previously been known for his tight
control over his youngest daughter's love life. As previously mentioned, he had
banned her boyfriends from visiting the family house and had gone to great
lengths to prevent her from being seen in public with them. Yet, for whatever
reason, Robert Maxwell clearly wanted information linking Ghislaine to the future
Duke to be put out into the public sphere. Though it is difficult to know exactly
what was behind this odd episode in Ghislaine’s past, the situation suggests that
Robert Maxwell saw Ghislaine’s young sexuality as a useful tool.

The story is also odd for other reasons. The motive of the blackmailer was
ostensibly to prevent Maxwell-owned papers from covering the Harvey Proctor
scandal. But Manners (Lord Granby in the article), who was allegedly involved
with Ghislaine, was also a close friend and later the employer of Harvey Proctor.
Why would someone close to Proctor seek to blackmail Maxwell by putting the
reputation of his own friend on the line?

In addition, the appearance of Harvey Proctor, then a Conservative member
of Parliament, in this tabloid spectacle is interesting for a few reasons. In 1987,
Proctor pleaded guilty to sexual indecency with two young men, who were sixteen
and nineteen at the time, and several witnesses interviewed in that investigation
described him as having a sexual interest in “young boys”? Later, a controversial
court case saw Proctor accused of having been involved with well-connected
British pedophile and procurer of children Jimmy Savile as well as being part of a
child sex-abuse ring that was said to include not only Savile but former UK prime
minister Ted Heath.

Of course, the Maxwell-owned newspapers, in covering the alleged effort to
blackmail Robert Maxwell, did not mention the “young boys” angle at all, instead
focusing on claims that distracted from the then-credible accusations of
pedophilia by claiming that Proctor was merely into “spanking” and was “whacky,”
among other things.*2

In this same 1985 period, Ghislaine also became involved with “philanthropy”
tied to her father’s business empire by hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and
benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO.4

Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, a gala
that was attended by members of the British Royal family. It’s worth noting that
the Marquess of Bath at the time was an odd person, having accumulated the
largest collection of paintings made by Adolf Hitler and having said that Hitler
had done “great things for his country”/4 The very same evening that the
Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging
from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms in what was labeled a
suicide.18

While Ghislaine was working in these capacities for her father’s business
empire, there are indications that she had also, to some extent, begun to become
involved in his espionage-related activities. According to former Israeli
intelligence operative and associate of Maxwell in his dealings with Mossad, Ari
Ben-Menashe, Ghislaine accompanied her father so frequently that she was
certainly involved with his intelligence work during this time, though he declined
to say just how involved she was.+*

Beginning roughly during this same period, in 1986, Ghislaine began dating
an Italian aristocrat named Count Gianfranco Cicogna, a member of the Knights
of Malta whose grandfather was Mussolini’s finance minister and the last doge of
Venice.} Cicogna also had ties to both covert and overt power structures in Italy
and beyond. As previously noted in chapter 3, Cicogna was related to the
Mavroleons, as his mother had been married to the patriarch of the Mavroleon
family — and original founder of London & Overseas — Basil “Bluey” Mavroleon.
Contact information for Bluey Mavroleon and his son, Nicholas Mavroleon
(Gianfranco’s half-brother), can be found in Epstein’s black book.1® Another
Cicogna-related entry in Epstein’s contact book is Luca Giussani, who was
Cicogna’s partner in a South African telecom company, Ursus. Also mentioned in
chapter 3 was the fact that the Mavroleons created London & Overseas with their
cousins, the Kulukundis family, who worked closely with Bruce Rappaport.
Rappaport, by this time, had become involved with notorious Russian mobster
Semion Mogilevich, as had Ghislaine’s father.

Cicogna’s relationship with Ghislaine lasted from 1986 until around
sometime in 1990, though numerous media outlets have misreported their
relationship in recent years, claiming they were only intimate briefly during the
early 1990s. It was reported in the British media in 1992 that Cicogna had been

Ghislaine’s “great love” and that he had “moulded the Ghislaine we now see. He
told her where to get her hair cut, and what to wear?

Toward the end of her relationship with Cicogna, Ghislaine founded the Kit
Kat Club, which she depicted as a feminist endeavor. Why Ghislaine chose the
name “Kit Kat Club” is something of a mystery. The original Kit Kat Club was set
up by a well-known pie maker named Christopher Catling in London during the
eighteenth century to promote the freedoms obtained during the 1688 Glorious
Revolution. Until the late 1800s, Catling’s organization was the only entity to use
the name. Then, in the 1900s, various wealthy private clubs, music venues, and
public houses adopted the name for establishments all around the UK. The
original name of the club created by Catling was also the inspiration behind the
naming of the famous KitKat chocolate bar produced by Nestlé.*2 The name
caught on, with independent music venues bearing the name in Wales, Northern
Ireland, and the North of England; there was even a Kit Kat Club band in
Scotland. Then came the 1966 musical Cabaret, which was set in the Kit Kat Club
in Berlin. Cabaret had been turned into a movie around the time Ghislaine
Maxwell supposedly founded and named her own Kit Kat organization, but her
true reasons for choosing this name may never be known.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald later described Maxwell’s Kit Kat
Club as “a salon held in a variety of locations, designed to bring together women
from the arts, politics, and society.’2+ The article goes on to quote an attendee of
the events, author Anna Pasternak, who stated, “It was bright, wealthy and society
women. Nowadays, it seems quite normal to be going to a meeting just for
women, but 30 years ago it seemed exciting”? Regarding Ghislaine, Pasternak
stated that she was “very mindful of who you were, your status, your importance. I
think it was more a way of advancing herself, making contacts that could be useful
to her.’

The Kit Kat Club, despite being described by other outlets as “an all-female
debating society” and group meant to “help women in commerce and industry,”
held functions that were hosted by Maxwell and that often had many men in
attendance.” One apparently frequent attendee of the Kit Kat Club was Jeffrey
Archer. Archer is a former Tory (i.e. Conservative Party) MP turned novelist who
has been accused of financial fraud on various occasions over the years and has
also served time in prison for perjury. He was another close colleague of Harvey
Proctor and personally helped finance Proctor’s business ventures following his

conviction for acts of “gross indecency” with two teenage boys.“ In a 1996 article
published by the Daily News, Archer said of his experience at the Kit Kat Club: “I
had the time of my life, surrounded by women under 40. I had orgasm after
orgasm just talking to them!”25

Archer can also be seen in images taken at a Kit Kat Club event in 2004.2°
Pictures from that same event show other attendees, including Stanley and Rachel
Johnson, the father and sister of recent UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.” Also
seen at this 2004 Kit Kat function was former Tory MP Jonathan Aitken, who
went to jail for perjury and is known for his close ties to Saudi royalty; former key
figure in the Rupert Murdoch media empire, Andrew Neil; and Anton Mosimann,
who has been called the “chef to royalty.”28

There has since been speculation that Ghislaine’s Kit Kat Club is where
Donald Trump met his future wife Melania. Although the New York Times and
other outlets reported that, at Fashion Week 1998, Donald Trump first met
Melania at the Kit Kat Club in New York, this locale was not related to Maxwell’s
Kit Kat Club and is instead a famous club in New York, the name of which is also
derived from Catling’s original Kit Kat Club.22 However, these same outlets also
reported that Epstein and Maxwell claimed to have been the ones who originally
introduced Donald and Melania Trump to each other.

Soon after her “painful” split from Gianfranco Cicogna, Ghislaine was seen
skiing in Aspen, Colorado — “where the rich and famous mix” during the winter
season — with American actor George Hamilton, who was also seen escorting

Ghislaine to the Epsom races in 1991.32

Hamilton, twenty-two years Ghislaine’s
senior, is apparently much more than just an actor, as he allegedly played a major
role in aiding Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and his
wife Imelda move billions of public funds out of the country and convert them
into private wealth for themselves and their accomplices abroad. Marcos originally
rose to power with the help of the CIA and, as previously mentioned, Adnan
Khashoggi - who worked with Epstein in the 1980s - was also close to the
Marcos'’s, specifically Imelda Marcos, and stood trial alongside her for his alleged
role in aiding her in illegal financial schemes.*4

In that same trial involving both Imelda Marcos and Adnan Khashoggi, a NY
prosecutor referred to Hamilton as a “front” for Marcos, and media reports at the
time claimed he had also acted as Imelda Marcos’s financial adviser. The Associated

Press reported that Hamilton had been an unindicted co-conspirator in the fraud

and racketeering cases brought against Imelda Marcos after she and her husband
fled their country in 198622 The congressional committee tasked with
investigating the flight of billions from the Philippines just prior to Marcos’s
ouster declined to investigate the financial transactions surrounding Hamilton,
which were alleged to have been connected to that very crime. Notably, at the
same time, the CIA refused to disclose what it knew about the capital flight

As mentioned later in this article, the private investigator hired by this
congressional committee to track down the Marcos’s money was Jules Kroll. Jules
Kroll and Kroll Associates seem to have been regularly brought in to help cover up
the crimes of many of the figures detailed in this book, including those of Bruce
Ritter, Michael Milken, the Marcos family, and Adnan Khashoggi. This firm’s rise
was also closely linked to Thomas Corbally (as noted in chapter 4) and, as will be
mentioned shortly, was also hired by Robert Maxwell shortly before his death.

Around the same time she was vacationing and traveling with Hamilton, in
1990, Ghislaine was added to the payroll of another of her father’s newspapers,
The European, which had launched that same year. It’s not exactly clear, however, at
what point she joined the company or in what role(s) she served. A website
recently set up by Ghislaine’s siblings following her July 2020 arrest for crimes
related to sex trafficking alongside Jeffrey Epstein states that she developed and
created “advertising opportunities” in the newspaper's supplement during her
time there.** This same year, she moved to the United States, first to Los Angeles
after being “offered a small part in a movie” that was being filmed there.*° Shortly
thereafter, her father - Robert Maxwell - would begin planning his grand entry
into the United States, specifically New York City.

ROBERT MAXWELL DESCENDS ON NEW YORK

Des the late 1980s, Robert Maxwell’s media empire began to falter as he

had overextended his finances by making massive purchases of large media
companies. Part of the reason behind his rapid, and arguably hasty, expansion was
related to his rivalry with fellow media baron Rupert Murdoch. Another factor
was his desire to become ever more wealthy and powerful. Former British
ambassador to the US Peter Jay, who had also served as Maxwell’s chief of staff,
later said that these purchases were partially motivated by Maxwell being
“offended and upset that he was seen as merely a printer.... He was determined to
go and demonstrate to the world that he was a publisher as well.”22

One of these purchases was Maxwell's acquisition of Macmillan Inc., where
Robert Pirie — president of Rothschild Inc. - “had been serving as chief tactician
in Maxwell’s offensive against” that particular company. It was also reported that
Maxwell's effort to acquire Macmillan was part of his “campaign to establish a
strategic presence in the United States.’ Yet, according to the New York Times,
Maxwell only “entered the fray” to purchase Macmillan after being “encouraged by
Pirie” and Pirie also “counseled” Maxwell on his subsequent moves that saw him
take control of the company in 1988.3? The Times article, which focused largely on
Pirie and Rothschild Inc., also reported that “The Macmillan takeover is critical to
Maxwell's standing as a world-class mogul. The deal is equally crucial to Pirie and
to his employers, the Rothschild family, who yearn for a prominent foothold in
Wall Street.” The article also adds that, for the Rothschilds, “dynastic pride as
much as money is at stake.”

The Rothschilds’ interest in gaining a foothold in Wall Street indeed seems to
have been motivated by more than money. The Times report notes that “although
the family staked valuable claims in Africa, the Middle East, and South America,
they grossly misjudged the opportunities directly across the Atlantic” and in the
United States. It quotes Evelyn de Rothschild as saying “We've been in business
for 200 years, but we never seized the initiative in America and that was one of the
mistakes my family made.”

In 1981, “the French and British Rothschild cousins determined to rectify
their mistake” and appointed Robert Pirie as “their agent.” They tasked him with
building “a powerful investment bank that would help the family reassert its

dominant role in international finance.’ In order to accomplish this task, Pirie
allied with “foreign predators, principally British,” the “most voracious” of whom
were James Goldsmith, a cousin of the Rothschilds, Clermont Club member, and
corporate raider; Goldsmith's associate Robert Maxwell; as well as Sir Gordon
White, a friend of Maxwell’s who originally connected him with Rothschild Inc.
Goldsmith's ties to Epstein, which apparently date back to the early 1970s, were
discussed in chapter 11.

The New York Times also states, perhaps controversially, that “No other family
in the annals of finance can match the Rothschild record for influencing the
course of history, or its Machiavellian instincts for economic opportunity.’ It
seems that, if we are to take this Times article at face value, the banking entity
looking to help the Rothschild family “reassert its dominant role in international
finance,” i.e. Rothschild Inc., was directing Robert Maxwell’s efforts to “establish a
strategic presence in the United States” via a takeover of a major US-based
publishing company. This intimate mate relationship between Rothschild banks
and Robert Maxwell would again become evident as N.M. Rothschild was the
group “called in to in vestigate his books and arrange the sale of his heirs’ 54
percent stake in Mirror Group Newspapers” after Maxwell’s 1991 death.*2

After Maxwell purchased Macmillan with the help of Pirie and Rothschild
Inc., he indeed used the company to establish his foothold in the United States,
specifically New York City. There, he would begin a sprawling influence operation
to cultivate the city’s elite, which would soon intimately involve his daughter
Ghislaine. With Macmillan under his control, he began using funds from the
company’s charitable trusts, “spend[ing] lavishly on events in New York, paying
large sums of money, sometimes as much as $100,000, for a seat at charitable
functions attended by people he wanted to impress.’*4 He had acquired
Macmillan for $2.6 billion, a sum “considerably more than his own Maxwell
Communications Corporation was worth.” The amount of money he had to repay
for this and other acquisitions of his period would become a factor in his infamous
decision to pilfer the pension funds of the Mirror Group.*#

Once he had obtained Macmillan, it gave him his desired “foothold in New
York publishing — and made him eager to expand his footprint.”*8 He had little
trouble raising money for this planned, grander entry into New York business and
society, despite his well-known past of financial chicanery that had earned him the
nickname “the bouncing Czech” back in the United Kingdom. Rothschild Inc. and

other prominent investment banks, such as Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers,
and Goldman Sachs lined up to represent and help finance Maxwell and his ever-
growing web of businesses and corporate entities.

Some speculated at the time that some of the funds Maxwell raised during this
period for these acquisitions had originated in the Soviet Union, where he had
considerable connections, including to the KGB. ‘There are also the possibilities
that some of the funds included proceeds from Maxwell’s sale of bugged PROMIS
software to governments around the world on Israel's behalf or, as previously
detailed in chapter 9, included profits from his business interests that were
interlaced with notorious Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich.

Despite having opened a considerable new stream of revenue through his
alliances with major players in Eastern European organized crime, major Wall
Street firms and “Machiavellian” banking dynasties, years of financial fraud and
stock-buying schemes caught up with Robert Maxwell’s empire, which began
rapidly imploding in early 1991. In what is often considered a bizarre move by
observers, given Maxwell’s dire financial situation and the poor state of the
newspaper, Maxwell decided to expand his presence in New York by buying the
New York Daily News in March 1991. However, Gordon Thomas later reported
that the paper's previous owners, the Chicago Tribune Group, had offered
Maxwell $60 million to take over the floundering paper. Regardless of the true
story behind his acquisition of the paper, he chose to put his daughter Ghislaine in
charge of “special projects” shortly after becoming its owner. That position, per
London's Sunday Times, “provided her with her entree to the power base of the
city”

In addition to her new role in charge of “special projects” for the paper,
Ghislaine was also made managing director of a “ready-made” company based in
New York and created by her father, Maxwell Corporate Gifts. The New York
Post later described the company as Ghislaine’s “own fiefdom.”*® Little is
otherwise known about Maxwell Corporate Gifts, with the Maxwell family
subsequently describing the company as “a business that supplied long-term
service awards for companies.” In 2021, Ghislaine’s siblings published a short
biography of their sister that asserted that Ghislaine had founded Maxwell
Corporate Gifts in the mid-1980s after her graduation from Oxford and before her
move to the US.°2 Their claim is at odds with past media reports that predate
Ghislaine’s infamy by several years and even decades. It is also possible, however,

that the entity's formal creation took place several years before its use by Ghislaine
and her father in New York.

Because no public records remain readily accessible regarding the company’s
activities, we can only speculate about how it was used by Ghislaine during this
time. However, it was most likely a part of the growing Maxwell influence network
in the city. New York media outlets subsequently claimed that Robert Maxwell
saw himself as “the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political
power on a global scale” and that he additionally saw New York City as where the
Maxwell “dynasty” would truly make their mark.>+

After buying the New York Daily News, and despite his mounting financial
problems, Maxwell received such positive attention in New York City that it
surprised even him. According to an anecdote from Robert Pirie, the then-
president of Rothschild Inc.:

After he bought the Daily News, I picked him up at his boat. He liked Chinese food, so I decided
to take him to Fu’s, which is the best Chinese restaurant in the city. As we drove up First Avenue,
people would recognize him, and open their car doors and come out and shake his hand. At Fu’s,
the entire restaurant got up on its feet and started clapping. He was overwhelmed. He told me,
“In my whole life in London, no one’s ever acted like this. I’m here a month and look what’s

happening”

This type of reception throughout the city led Maxwell to become even more
determined to expand his presence there. He hired a “group of prominent
consultants and lawyers to help him make his way in America”$ These included
former Senators Howard Baker and John Tower as well as Republican Party
consultant and high-profile public relations executive Robert Keith Gray. The
inclusion of these three men in advising Maxwell on his entry into the United
States is highly significant, but each is important for a different reason.

Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, best known for being the vice-chairman of
the Senate Watergate Committee and subsequently Reagan’s chief of staff after the
Iran-Contra scandal, had become Robert Maxwell's business partner in 1991 in a
venture called Newstar. Newstar focused on expanding investment opportunities
for Americans in the former Soviet Union and was described by Richard Jacobs,
who cofounded the company with Baker, as “an international merchant banking,
investment, and advisory company.’ Jacobs also stated that Robert Maxwell was
one of the major shareholders in the company. Newstar was just one of several
companies that Maxwell used to enrich himself through privatizing assets of the

former Soviet Union. Baker and Maxwell also attempted to recruit other respected
public figures into Newstar, including the former top banking regulator in the US,
William Seidman.* Notably, prior to founding Newstar with Baker, Jacobs
worked intimately with Armand Hammer as his assistant and then as Occidental
Petroleum’s vice president.* As previously mentioned in chapter 7, Hammer
played a role in the entry of BCCI into the United States and had attempted to
acquire Financial General Bankshares himself for the purpose of “financially
blackmailing” American politicians. Hammer also had a controversial relationship
with Soviet leadership. Part of the controversy was related to Hammer's father,
Julius Hammer, having been a Soviet spy. Baker was also previously mentioned in
Chapter 9, as he had been on the board of MCA, where Lew Wasserman was a
long-time executive, at the time the company was being investigated for its
organized crime ties. It was posited there that Baker may have been the “United
States Senator with much seniority whom [Robert Booth] Nichols claimed to
utilize in the trafficking of narcotics and money laundering.”

Maxwell may have first encountered Baker through Baker’s years-long
relationship with Senator Tower, as the two men shared a decades-long
partnership in the Senate. As detailed in chapter 9, Maxwell had first gotten close
to Tower years earlier, at Henry Kissinger’s behest, with the intention of advancing
Israeli intelligence’s goal of installing PROMIS software on the computers of top-
secret US laboratories tied to the nuclear weapons program. It was Maxwell who
placed Tower on Israel’s payroll, prompted his involvement in the Iran-Contra
deal, and later added him to his own payroll via the company Pergamon-Brassey,
which appears to have been strongly related to both the PROMIS scandal and the
Bulgarian-led Neva program. Tower died just months before Maxwell, in early
1991, as the result of a suspicious plane crash, which — at the time — reportedly
made Robert Maxwell fear for his own life.

Robert Keith Gray is perhaps the key to unlocking the truth about Robert
Maxwell's plans and ambitions for his future in New York City. As detailed
throughout this work, Gray was a smooth operator, having worked on major
presidential campaigns and as the top executive at the public relations firm Hill
and Knowlton. Lesser known are Gray’s extensive ties to US intelligence and also
to a handful of call girl and sexual-blackmail rings that encircled the Watergate
scandal of the Nixon presidency and the more obscure Koreagate scandal and
pageboy scandal (explored in depth in chapter 5). As previously mentioned, Gray

was also tied, through connections in his home state of Nebraska, to figures
involved in the Franklin Scandal (see chapter 10). One of the common threads
throughout several of the scandals that were linked in some way to Gray was the
Georgetown Club, owned by South Korean intelligence asset Tongsun Park. Gray
was the company’s president at the time when it was used by CIA and other
intelligence-linked figures to acquire sexual blackmail. John Tower was also a
member of the Georgetown Club during this period, as were many other
prominent politicians and power brokers in Washington, DC, and had been close
to Tongsun Park as well. Also, as noted in chapter 10, Gray was working for Adnan
Khashoggi in the same period of time that both Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein also
counted Khashoggi as a client. Given that Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine and
Epstein would begin a sex trafficking/blackmail operation shortly after Maxwell
sought to consult Baker, Tower and Gray, Gray’s role in advising Maxwell about
how to best expand his influence in the city and throughout the United States is
clearly significant.

Robert Maxwell himself had been a client of Gray’s PR firm, H & K, for some
time and Gray had previously had very public connections with Maxwell. For
instance, in 1988, Gray brought former president Ronald Reagan and Robert
Maxwell to Hastings, Nebraska — located roughly two hours from Omaha — for
the ceremonial debut of the Gray Center for the Communication Arts at the local
college. Maxwell returned to Hastings two years later to deliver the
commencement speech at the college. Gray, meanwhile, told the Washington
Times that “getting President Reagan and Robert Maxwell to Nebraska” was his
“greatest feat.’®° That says a lot considering the trajectory and impact of Gray’s
career up to this point in time.

During this period where he sought these men’s advice on how to grow his
influence in New York, Robert Maxwell was also eager to get closer to George
H.W. Bush - then the US president — with whom he had cultivated a relationship
decades earlier.2 It is unclear how successful Maxwell was in that effort. Yet, as
noted in chapter 12, by 1992, Jeffrey Epstein had developed a mysterious yet
apparently significant relationship with Bush's Secretary of State James Baker III,
suggesting that the Epstein-Maxwell network did make significant in-roads with
the Bush administration. As will be detailed in the next chapter, they did so again
to a much more significant degree with the subsequent Clinton administration.

Soon after Robert Maxwell's effort to expand his footprint in New York, which
author Gordon Thomas alleges was motivated by Maxwell’s desire to become
“king” of the city, he was also being “courted” by Edgar Bronfman, Laurence
Tisch, and other “luminaries of the New York Jewish community” in 1991.58
Bronfman and Tisch, as noted in the previous chapter, were among the founding
members of the Mega Group, which had been founded that same year by Leslie
Wexner and Edgar Bronfman’s brother Charles. Charles Bronfman had previously
teamed up with Maxwell in 1989 in an ill-fated attempt to purchase the Jerusalem
Post=? As noted in the last chapter, several Mega Group members, including
Wexner and the Bronfmans, have clear ties to organized crime networks and/or
intelligence. Maxwell himself also checked these boxes.

The Mega Group’s existence was not revealed to the public until seven years
later, in 1998. At that time, it underwent a very public reveal in the Wall Street
Journal, and the names of its most prominent members were disclosed.© Given
that Robert Maxwell was connected to this network and was being “courted” by
its members the year of its founding, as well as the fact that Maxwell had died long
before the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, it is worth considering the
possibility that Robert Maxwell himself was potentially an early Mega Group
member and that the only reason his name was not included in the WSJ's
disclosure of the group is because he had died years prior. Circumstantial, yet
significant, support for this thesis can be found in the subsequent team-up of
Jeffrey Epstein, who had been a financial adviser to Mega Group co-founder Leslie
Wexner since 1987 and his money manager since 1990, and Ghislaine Maxwell,
Robert Maxwell's favorite daughter, in 1991 — the same year of the Mega Group’s
founding — in a sexual blackmail operation, itself ultimately an influence and
extortion operation.

COURTING THE KENNEDYS

A previously noted, soon after arriving in New York City, Robert Maxwell was

determined to expand his footprint in there as well as to grow the influence
of a Maxwell “dynasty.” His hopes to establish a dynasty were also described by
the New York Post, which noted that Maxwell “saw himself as Britain’s Joseph P.
Kennedy, the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power
on a global scale. Like Kennedy, he expected much of his children and pushed
them hard.”

Yet, Robert Maxwell’s interest in the Kennedy political dynasty went beyond
mere metaphors. A 1992 article from the Mail on Sunday stated that Ghislaine’s
“one important role” when she arrived in New York City was to act “as Captain
Bob's [i.e. Robert Maxwell’s] ticket into New York society [ ... ] She accompanied
him to all the right parties and helped to woo the Kennedy clan.’

Apparently “woo” was meant in relatively literal terms. Per Vanity Fair, he had
apparently hoped that his daughter Ghislaine, then serving as his “ambassador to
America,’ would intermarry with them, specifically John F. Kennedy Jr., thereby
“binding two great dynasties into one.” This desire was also reported by the New
York Post, which later stated that “Maxwell even dreamed that he might one day
forge an alliance with the Kennedys by marrying Ghislaine to JFK Jr. The two
became close friends and remained so until Kennedy’s tragic death last year
[1999]. It then notes that “Ghislaine has also been a guest at a number of
Kennedy weddings and family events%

One of these weddings Ghislaine attended was the June 1990 nuptials
between Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo, the son of New York governor Mario Cuomo who would later become
governor of the state himself, was said to have treated the planning of the wedding
“like a political campaign” and, not unlike Robert Maxwell, had allegedly sought
to marry into the Kennedy political dynasty for personal gain.®8 Notably, Andrew
Cuomo’s name is in Epstein’s book of contacts. However, other attendees of the
Kennedy-Cuomo wedding have claimed that it was likely Kerry Kennedy, not
Cuomo, who had invited Ghislaine Maxwell to the event.2

Per Cuomo’s biographer Michael Shnayerson: “To the Cuomos, the Kennedys
were American royalty, for all the reasons they were to everyone else. Marrying

into that charismatic clan would make the Cuomos royal, too, insofar as any
American political dynasty could be seen as such. It would also draw them into a
private world of wealth and privilege”? It seems probable that Robert Maxwell’s
dream to see Ghislaine marry a Kennedy had similar motivations.

However, it is worth noting that Ghislaine Maxwell’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s
subsequent influence and blackmail operation, beginning in 1991, had largely
targeted politicians or prominent figures within the Democratic Party. Given this
context, it is also entirely possible that Robert Maxwell and his network, including
organized crime networks and intelligence services, were looking for a launching
pad to more broadly influence the Democratic Party before Maxwell’s death — and
what better way to do that than marry into the most prominent (and respected) of
Democratic political dynasties.

During and after this wedding, it seems that Ghislaine Maxwell's efforts to
court a Kennedy were extensive and have been largely overlooked in media
reports. For instance, a photo taken of a reception for the Kennedy-Cuomo
wedding shows Ghislaine sitting in the grass in a short dress, posing flirtatiously
alongside Joe Kennedy II, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy and Kerry
Kennedy’s older brother. The caption of the image oddly does not disclose
Maxwell's identity but stated that Kennedy “turned on the famous Kennedy
charm” while talking to Maxwell, described as “a lovely brunette” who “couldn't
take her eyes off him [Kennedy].”

That reception was at the Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate and was attended by a
“trimmed-down group” of wedding guests. Maxwell also reportedly attended an
“even-more-private lunch at Ethel’s home that was attended only by family and
some tag-along[s] with odd links to the bride or groom,” per one attendee. A few
months later, in November 1990, Joe Kennedy II arrived with Ghislaine Maxwell
to a ritzy London party in honor of the fashion designer for the royal family and
other elites, Bruce Oldfield At the time, Joe Kennedy was separated and
finalizing his divorce from his first wife Sheila Brewster Rauch.

During her early days in New York City, Maxwell befriended John F. Kennedy
Jr. and several media reports have claimed that the friendship lasted until the
former’s death in a 1999 plane crash. Few details are known about their
friendship and only a few pictures of them interacting at large social events have
emerged, including photos showing Kennedy being approached by Maxwell and

then quickly losing interest in her, focusing his attention instead on nearby hors
d’oeuvres.22

While details of their relationship are scarce, it was later reported that
Maxwell had claimed to have had a “one-night stand” with John F. Kennedy Jr. and
she reportedly told friends that he was her “chief conquest.’ The tryst allegedly
took place “in the early 1990s soon after Ghislaine had started to establish herself
on the New York social scene” according to an anonymous source that was “close
to Maxwell.”28 Although there is no corroboration for this claim, Maxwell’s father
had desired this match and, given Ghislaine’s devotion to her father (who was still
alive at the time), it seems probably that she would have attempted to have
relations with him if she had indeed had the chance.

Several questions arise from this — the first being how did Ghislaine Maxwell
manage to gain entry into the Kennedy’s social network? In an interview with
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for this book, he stated that Ghislaine Maxwell's entry into
his family’s social network in the early 1990s was likely through his former wife
Mary Richardson. Per Kennedy, Richardson seemed to have known Maxwell
through Richardson's former boyfriend Carlos Mavroleon. There is considerable
supporting evidence for this claim.

Before their 1994 marriage, Mary Richardson had been close friends for years
with his sister, Kerry Kennedy, with the two having first met during their time
together at the Putney School and later as roommates in college. Richardson
was Kennedy’s maid of honor at her marriage to Andrew Cuomo. After becoming
close to Kerry Kennedy at the Putney school, Mary spent many holidays with the
Kennedy family, with a friend of Mary’s stating that “Mary was always with the
Kennedys. Unless there was a crisis, she never had anything to do with the
Richardsons.”®2 She began dating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 1993, and they married
a year later.

Media reports attest to Richardson having dated Carlos Mavroleon prior to
her relationship with Robert Kennedy Jr.24 As mentioned earlier in this chapter,
the Mavroleons were relatives of Ghislaine’s boyfriend from 1986 to 1990,
Gianfranco Cicogna. More specifically, Carlos Mavroleon was Gianfranco’s half-
brother and Carlos’s father and brother were both in Epstein’s contact book. In the
1980s, Carlos converted to Islam and joined Afghanistans Mujahideen, which
received training and funding from the CIA.

Reports on Mavroleon’s 1998 death from a heroin overdose suggested he was
murdered even though his death was ruled a suicide. At the time of his death, he
had been working as a journalist and was the first outsider to visit camps “that the
CIA believed were run by Osama Bin Laden” that had just been bombed by US
cruise missiles.82 He was subsequently detained by Pakistani intelligence and,
shortly thereafter, found dead in his hotel room.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also stated that the two occasions he was on Epstein’s
plane had been arranged between Ghislaine Maxwell and Mary Richardson. In
one instance, the flight was part of a pre-planned fossil hunting trip to South
Dakota, which he believed had been Ghislaine’s idea as Epstein had appeared to
only have attended “grudgingly” On that trip, Kennedy remembered that Epstein
“did not mingle with us and hardly spoke and did not participate in the fossil
hunt” The other flight came about after Richardson accepted an offer from
Ghislaine to fly Richardson and her family from New York to Palm Beach in order
to visit Ethel Kennedy (his mother). Kennedy said he and Mary were
accompanied by Kennedy’s two older children on each flight.

On one of the flights, the return trip to New York from South Dakota, Epstein
“clearly” had a problem with Kennedy’s “rambunctious children” and “half way
back to New York, he [Epstein] ordered the pilot to put down at Midway Field in
Chicago. He got off the plane and made his own way home. A blonde was waiting
for him at planeside in Chicago.’ Kennedy remembered that Ghislaine was “in
silent tears” after Epstein’s abrupt departure.

Among other questions that emerge when considering Ghislaine’s efforts to
court at least two Kennedy men — would she have continued to court a Kennedy,
or perhaps a Democratic politician of influence, if her father had not died so
abruptly in late 1991? Indeed, Robert Maxwell’s planned trajectory, not just for
himself but for his “dynasty,” was in tatters after his death, particularly as his
financial crimes were revealed, permanently staining his legacy. Indeed, numerous
reports have alleged that it was the chaos after her father’s abrupt death that drove
Ghislaine so publicly into the arms of Jeffrey Epstein.

THE DEATH OF ROBERT MAXWELL

A the end of October 1991, Robert Maxwell contacted private investigator

Jules Kroll and arranged a meeting to see if he could hire Kroll to investigate a
“conspiracy” to ruin him financially and destroy his empire. Kroll told Maxwell he
would take the case.

Jules Kroll’s involvement in this matter is significant for several reasons but
chiefly because of the ties of his firms to US and Israeli intelligence. Kroll
Associates, founded by Jules Kroll in 1972, became known as “the CIA of Wall
Street” and was later alleged by French intelligence to have been used as an actual
front for the CIA.% As noted in chapter 4, the organized crime and intelligence-
connected Thomas Corbally had played a major role in the firm’s early days.

The reasoning behind the “CIA of Wall Street” nickname is partially related to
the company’s penchant for hiring former CIA and FBI officers as well as former
operatives of Britains MI6 and Israel’s Mossad. The successor company to Kroll
Associates, K2 Intelligence, has similar hiring practices. In 2020, former Kroll
Associates employee Roy Den Hollander was accused of murdering the son of
New York judge Esther Salas at their family home just as Salas was due to preside
over a case involving the ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Deutsche Bank.ŝ$

At the time that Robert Maxwell hired Kroll, the brother of then-US president
and former CIA director George H.W. Bush - Jonathan Bush - was on its
corporate advisory board. Soon afterward, Kroll was employed by Bill Clinton in
his first presidential campaign and was later hired to manage security for the
World Trade Center in New York after the 1993 bombing. In addition, Kroll had
been hired to investigate how money had been spirited out of the Philippines by
the Marcos family. As previously mentioned, Ghislaine’s friend and vacation
buddy George Hamilton, as well as Adnan Khashoggi, had played a significant
role in that affair.

Furthermore, just weeks before 9/11, Kroll worked closely with John P.
O’Neill, who was hired as the head of security at the World Trade Center shortly
before the attacks. As previously mentioned in chapter 9, O’Neill had been
involved in efforts to unravel “Maxwell's legacy.” A report from January of that year
noted that federal investigators were still trying to determine “how much of her

[Ghislaine’s] father’s fortune is buried in the offshore trusts he used so freely for
the benefit of his family.’

Kroll was unable to give Robert Maxwell the information he had wanted
before Maxwell died under suspicious circumstances on his yacht in November
1991. Though media reports often say that his death was most likely a suicide,
several biographers, investigators, and Ghislaine herself assert that he was
murdered, having hit the end of the line in terms of his usefulness to those who
had empowered his legal and illegal activities over the years.24 Many of them have
asserted that “rogue” Mossad agents had been responsible, including Ghislaine
herself. Ghislaine reportedly blames “a dark conspiracy of Mossad renegades and
Sicilian contract killers” for taking her father’s life.88

Soon after news of Robert Maxwell's death spread, his wife Betty Maxwell,
accompanied by Ghislaine, headed to his place of death — his yacht, then located
near the Canary Islands. Journalist John Jackson, who was present when Ghislaine
and Betty boarded the yacht shortly after Robert’s death, claims that it was
Ghislaine who “coolly walked into her late father’s office and shredded all
incriminating documents on board.’® Ghislaine denies the incident, though
Jackson has never retracted his claim, which was reported in a 2007 article
published in the Daily Mail.2° If Jackson is to believed, it would indicate that
Ghislaine — out of all of Robert Maxwell’s children — was most intimately aware of
the incriminating secrets of her father’s financial empire and espionage activities.
However, Betty Maxwell subsequently claimed that Ghislaine had been the child
she chose to accompany her because she spoke Spanish and could help more than
her other children in communicating with local authorities. As previously
mentioned, the books of Robert Maxwell’s troubled businesses, several of which
were insolvent and/or had engaged in substantial fraud, were subsequently
“investigated” by N.M. Rothschild.

“CIRCLING THE WAGONS”

A the death of Robert Maxwell, his children - Ghislaine included — began
o pick up the pieces and sought to rebuild their father’s empire. Of his seven
children, five appeared to take on different aspects of their father’s legitimate and
illegitimate business activities.

Kevin and Ian Maxwell took over much of his businesses (and the associated
fall-out) along with his murky network of interlocking companies, trusts, and
foundations spread throughout the world. Once they were officially cleared of
wrongdoing in connection with Robert Maxwell’s financial crimes (despite
evidence of their complicity), they began their own forays into the world of
business. Over the next ten years, Kevin would serve as director of 81 different
companies, only 32 of which survived, while Ian — in 2001 - was director 31
companies, four of which then faced insolvency.

Ghislaine, having already positioned herself in New York at her father’s behest
to anchor his efforts to expand his empire and operations into Manhattan, began a
sexual blackmail operation on behalf of Israeli intelligence alongside Jeffrey
Epstein (discussed in depth in chapters 18 and 19). Yet, she reportedly began
“working selling real estate” shortly after her father’s death, which may have been
connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s career as a “property developer” at the time (see
chapter 12).

Throughout the 1990s, however, Maxwell described herself to the press as an
“internet operator.’ That latter claim seems to trace back to the efforts after Robert
Maxwell’s death of her twin sisters, Christine and Isabel Maxwell. They appeared
to take off where Maxwell's intelligence-linked work with PROMIS and in
technology had left off and they started by cashing in on a new revolutionary
technology - the Internet.

“We literally were trying to think about how to restart this whole business”
that had collapsed after their father’s death, Christine Maxwell would later say of
her decision to found, along with her husband Roger Malina, Isabel and Isabel's
then-husband David Hayden, their internet services company — the McKinley
Group — in January 1992.4 Isabel would remember the decision similarly, telling
Wired in 1999, that she and her sister had “wanted to circle the wagons and

rebuild,” seeing McKinley as “a chance to recreate a bit of their father’s legacy?

Years later, in 2000, Isabel would tell The Guardian that her father would “love it
[the internet] if he was still here”? “He was very prescient.... He’d be in his
element, he'd be having a blast, ’m sure he'd be thrilled to know what I’m doing
now, she told the UK-based publication while “throwing back her head and
laughing loudly.”

Notably, at that time, Isabel was leading an Israeli software company with ties
to Israeli military intelligence and powerful Israeli political players, including
some who had previously worked directly with her father in his espionage
activities. Isabel's and Christine’s connections following the sale of the McKinley
group is detailed in chapters 20 and 21, respectively.

It’s not hard to see why Christine and Isabel saw the internet as their chance to
expand upon and rebuild upon Robert Maxwell's “legacy.” As previously
mentioned in chapter 9, Christine, right up until her father’s death, had been
president and CEO of the Robert Maxwell-owned Israeli intelligence front
company, Information on Demand, where Isabel had also worked. Upon his
death, Christine had founded a related (and similarly named) company called
Research on Demand, which specialized in “internet and big data analytics” for
telecommunications firms, and would later overlap with the McKinley Group's
work. McKinley began as a directory with a rating system for websites, later
transitioning into the Magellan search engine, all of which was Christine's idea
according to an interview Isabel Maxwell gave to Cnet in 1997.74

McKinley created what became known as the Magellan online directory,
remembered as “the first site to publish lengthy reviews and ratings of websites.’
Magellan's “value-added content” approach attracted several large corporations,
resulting in “major alliances” with AT&T, Time Warner, IBM, Netcom, and the
Microsoft Network [MSN], all of which were negotiated by Isabel Maxwell.28
Microsofts major alliance with McKinley came in late 1995, when Microsoft
announced that Magellan would power the search option for the company’s MSN
service. Time Warner first chose Magellan for its early web portal called
Pathfinder and Magellan was on the homepage of the internet browser Netscape
for much of the 1990s.

However, McKinley’s fortunes were troubled as its efforts to be the first search
engine to go public fell through, igniting a stand-off between Christine Maxwell
and Isabel’s then-husband that also resulted in the company’s essentially falling
behind other market leaders. As a result, it missed the window for a second IPO

attempt and failed to increase ad revenue“ Excite, which was later acquired by
AskJeeves, ultimately bought the McKinley Group and Magellan for 1.2 million
shares of Excite stock in 1996, which was then valued at $18 million1@ It was
allegedly Isabel Maxwell who made the deal possible, with Excite’s CEO at the
time, George Bell, claiming she alone salvaged their purchase of McKinley

Despite the company’s lackluster end, the Maxwell sisters and other
stakeholders in the company, Ghislaine Maxwell among them, not only obtained a
multi-million dollar payout from the deal, but also forged close connections with
Silicon Valley high-rollers, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Upon
McKinley/Magellan’s sale, the overt ties of Christine and Isabel Maxwell to
intelligence in both the U.S. and Israel would grow considerably (see chapters 20
and 21).

While the company is often framed as being a venture between Christine and
Isabel Maxwell, the McKinley Group and Magellan were much more than just the
twin sisters’ business. For instance, a November 2003 article in the Evening
Standard notes that Christine and Isabel launched the company with considerable
help from their brother, Kevin Maxwell who the article described as being
“consumed by an overwhelming desire to be his ‘dad reincorporated’” according
to confidants.1°3 Another Evening Standard article from March 2001 claimed that

“Kevin played a major role” in the company’s affairs 14

In addition, the Sunday Times noted in November 2000 that Ghislaine
Maxwell “had a substantial interest in Magellan” and netted a considerable sum
following its sale to Excite in 1996.12 It also noted that Ghislaine, throughout the
1990s, had “been discreetly building up a business empire as opaque as her
father’s” and that “she is secretive to the point of paranoia and her business affairs
are deeply mysterious.’ She would nevertheless describe “herself as an ‘internet
operator
or the nature of her business.” A separate article in The Scotsman from 2001 also

399

even though “her office in Manhattan refuses to confirm even the name

notes that Ghislaine “is extremely secretive about her affairs and describes herself
as an internet operator” 126

Exactly how involved Ghislaine Maxwell was in the McKinley Group and
Magellan is unclear, though her decision to describe herself as an “internet
operator” and her documented “substantial interest” in the company suggest that
it was more than superficial. Also notable is the fact that Ghislaine’s time as an

“internet operator” and her business interests in Magellan overlapped directly

with her time working alongside Jeffrey Epstein in an intelligence-linked sex
trafficking/sexual blackmail operation.

ENTER EPSTEIN

ollowing her father’s death, Ghislaine publicly claimed to know next to

nothing of his affairs and to have no money herself, despite it being well
known that her father had created numerous trusts in the Lichtenstein tax haven
that were meant to fund the Maxwell family for “generations.” A New York
detective who interviewed Ghislaine in Manhattan while trying to trace her
father’s assets later stated:

She came in dressed in sackcloth and ashes. It was pathetic. She said she had no money. Yet here
was this expensive lawyer arguing with us in a room so air conditioned we couldn't hear what he
said. In between claiming she had no money, you couldn't but help warming to her, she was so
solicitous. We hadn’t had any lunch and she was recommending restaurants here and there and
where to stay and go shopping, and slipping in from time to time how she never had anything to

do with her father’s affairs 107

Another investigator said that “It is entirely possible, and we didn't have the
resources to check, that Maxwell could have siphoned off money from some of his
400 companies in America to her. She was living on something.”12%

In 1992, Ghislaine repeated the claims that she was destitute but promised her
family would soon make a comeback. That year, she told Vanity Fair, “Tm
surviving — just. But I can’t just die quietly in a corner ... I would say we'll be
back. Watch this space”!® As previously mentioned, it was during this same
period that the Maxwell siblings were “circling the wagons” and attempting to
rebuild their father’s empire and legacy, potentially including his intelligence
activities. H?

It later emerged that, during this period and the years that followed, Ghislaine
had shifted from being dependent on her father to being “entirely dependent” on
Jeffrey Epstein for her “lavish lifestyle” H Some acquaintances of Ghislaine have
since claimed that “she started working for him [Epstein] immediately after her
father died? H2

Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein’s public relationship is believed to have officially
begun in 1991 during a tribute dinner at the Plaza Hotel held in Robert Maxwell’s
honor, where Epstein sat at the same table with Ghislaine and Betty Maxwell.
According to media reports, this was Ghislaine’s “first step in publicly announcing

3

her deep affection for him [Epstein] The choice of the Plaza would prove to be

ironic given that Ghislaine and Epstein were beginning an extensive sexual-
blackmail operation that would go on for well over a decade. As detailed in
chapter 2, the hotel had previously been the site of a sexual-blackmail operation
involving the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn and his mentor, the liquor magnate
Lewis Rosenstiel. The Plaza Hotel was purchased in 1988, not long after Cohn’s
death, by Cohn’s protégé Donald Trump.

In the year that followed his first public appearance with Ghislaine, Epstein
was treated by both the press and those close to Ghislaine as her father
reincorporated, with various media reports stating and/or quoting their associates
comparing Epstein directly to Robert Maxwell. Some of these reports, some
published as early as 1992, also openly discussed the possibility that Epstein, like
Robert Maxwell, was working for Israeli intelligence as well as the CIA.H4

Endnotes

“George Brown and Ghislaine Maxwell,’ Getty Images,

ghislaine-maxwell-who-is-sat-on-fotograf%25C3%25ADa-de-noticias/1161864085.

Jon Kelly, “Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell? The Story of Her Downfall,’ BBC News, June 28, 2022,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59733623.

Benjamin Weiser, “Maxwell Describes Childhood Mistreatment in Bid for Lighter Sentence;

4

maxwell-sentence-jeffrey-epstein.html.

Guy Kelly, “Ghislaine Maxwell: From Socialite to Shadowy Figure in a Sex Scandal; Daughter
of a Media Mogul, Darling of the Cocktail Scene, and Friend Guy Kelly Lifts the Lid on a UI, of
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socialite-to-shadowy-figure-in.pdf.

Petronella Wyatt, “The Night Ghislaine Tried to Give Me a Very Public Sex Lesson,’ Mail
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information.service.gov.uk/company/00470509/officers.

Saskia Sissons, “Mysterious Business of the Queen of NY-Lon,’ Sunday Times (London),
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noticias/637669478.

“1987: MP on Gay Sex Charges,’ BBC, April 16, 1987,
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Andrew Pierce, “Spanking Parties and the Enoch Fan Too Right Wing for Maggie,’ Mail

Enoch-fan-right-wing-Maggie-Shamed-Tory-MP-Harvey-Proctor-revelled-notoriety-writes-
ANDREW-PIERCE.html.
Alamy Limited, “Photo: Ghislaine Meets Henry Thynne, Lord and Lady Bath,’ Alamy,

day-out-for-the-kids-at-lord-and-lady-84714570.html.

William Langley, “The Marquess of Bath: The Old Lion Abandons His Pride,’ The Telegraph,
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Guy Kelly, “Ghislaine Maxwell: How Did She Go from Socialite to the Shadowy Figure in a Sex
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content/uploads/2021/12/2019-08-13-Ghislaine-Maxwell -How-did-she-go-from-socialite-
to-the.pdf.

16
17

20

21

22

23

24
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Whitney Webb, “Former Israeli Spy Ari Ben-Menashe on Israel's Relationship with Epstein,’
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rael-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/263465/; “Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Her

Dad's (Robert) Yacht in May 1989,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 17, 1989,
Whitney Webb, “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the
Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,” MintPress News, August 7, 2019,

scandal/261172/.

Edward Helmore and Mark Townsend, “High Society to Hideaway Arrest: Ghislaine Maxwell’s
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news/2020/jul/04/high-society-to-hideaway-arrest-ghislaine-maxwells-dramatic-fall.
Webb, “Mega Group.’

Michael Robotham, “The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Secret Love; Revealed: The Unlikely
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International Herald Tribune, “1925:Kit Kat Club : In Our Pages:100, 75 and 50 Years Ago,’
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kat-club-in-our-pages100-75-and-50-years-ago.html.

Mail Online Staff, “Why Is a KitKat Called a KitKat? Vintage Nestle Poster Reveals All,” Mail
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chef-named-Christopher-Catling,html.
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love-a-wall.html.
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epstein-s-best-friend-20200103-p530mx.html.

Brown and Alexander, “The Rise and Fall of Ghislaine Maxwell)’; “Anna Pasternak - Writer,’
Anna Pasternak, https://www.annapasternak.co.uk/.

“Photo: Elizabeth Harris, Jonathan Aitken, Stanley Johnson,’ Getty Images, July 5, 2004,

harris-former-mp-jonathan-aitken-fotograf%25C3%25ADa-de-noticias/51027008.
“1987: MP on Gay Sex Charges.’
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10.39.11.jpeg.

“Photos: Kit Kat Club” July 5, 2004, https://www.gettyimages.com.mx/fotos/kit-kat-club-
maxwell?

oldest

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28

29

30

31

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33

34
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39
40

41
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“Photo: Elizabeth Harris, Jonathan Aitken, Stanley Johnson.”

“Photo: Elizabeth Harris, Jonathan Aitken, Stanley Johnson,’; Guardian staff, “Aitken Jailed for
18 Months,’ The Guardian, June 8, 1999,
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/jun/08/uk; “Guest, Chef Anton Mosimann,
actress Fiona Macpherson and Lord Jeffrey Archer,” Getty Images, July 5, 2004,

anton-mosimann-actress-fiona-fotograf%25C3%25ADa-de-noticias/51027010.
International Herald Tribune, “1925: Kit Kat Club,’; Douglas Charles, “Alleged Jeffrey Epstein
Address Book Contains Hundreds Of Names, Including Celebrities And Politicians,’ BroBible,

politicians/.

Edward Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob,’ Vanity Fair, March 1992,
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/772fa3a5-0e89-4442-9c1f-3e0dbe42349;
Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a
Media Mogul, 1st Carroll & Graf ed (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 239,

hamilton-with-ghislaine-maxwell-fotograf%25C3%25ADa-de-noticias/1161864082.
Nick Davies, “The $10bn Question: What Happened to the Marcos Millions?,’ The Guardian,

trial-turns-to-khashoggi.html.

“Report: Marcos Moved Funds Through Actor George Hamilton,’ AP News, October 9, 1990,
https://apnews.com/article/5710a62f791a248dc54e74fd2a89bea5.

“Actor George Hamilton Denies Marcos Link in Home Sale,” UPI, March 28, 1986,
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home-sale/8031512370000/.

Davies, “The $10bn Question”

“About Ghislaine Maxwell,” RealGhislaine.com, https://www.realghislaine.com/about-
ghislaine.

“about Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

William H. Meyers, “Megadealer for the Rothschilds,” New York Times, December 4, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/magazine/meagdealer-for-the-rothschilds.html.

Meyers, “Megadealer.’

Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849-1999 (New York:
Penguin, 1998), 526, https://archive.org/details/houseofrothschil000v2ferg_c6f9.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 171.
Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 171, 188.
Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 196.
Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

Sissons, “Mysterious Business.”

46
47

48

49
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54
55

56

57
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Sissons, “Mysterious Business.”

UK News, “Robert Maxwell's Contacts Book to Be Auctioned after Discovery in ‘Dusty Box?
Express & Star, December 18, 2020, https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-
news/2020/12/18/robert-maxwells-contacts-book-to-be-auctioned-after-discovery-in-
dusty-box/.

Peter Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes - Maxwell’s Heirs Building a New
Business Empire,’ New York Post, March 23, 2000, https://nypost.com/2000/03/23/how-
ghislaine-rose-from-the-ashes-maxwells-heirs-building-a-new-business-empire/.

“About Ghislaine Maxwell.”

“About Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.’

Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.”

Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

“His Collateral? Prestige,’ Daily News (New York), December 15, 1991.

Hearing on Business and Investment Opportunities in the Baltic States, Eastern Europe and the
Former Soviet Union, Hearings Before the Committee on Small Business, United States
Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session, November 21, 1991, Vol 4, p. 119.

Susan Trento, The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in
Washington (St. Martin's Press, 1992), 377,
https://archive.org/details/powerhouserobertOOtren.

Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 41.

Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

“Maxwell and Bronfman Make Joint Bid for Jerusalem Post,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April

jerusalem-post.

Whitney Webb, “Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl,” Unlimited Hangout, December 16, 2021,
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/12/investigative-reports/meet-ghislaine-daddys-girl/.
Lisa Miller, “Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish Philanthropy,’ Wall Street
Journal, May 4, 1998, https://www.wsj,.com/articles/SB894240270899870000.

Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.”

Robotham, “The mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell's secret love.”

Mark Seal, “Ghislaine, Is That You?’: Inside Ghislaine Maxwell's Life on the Lam,’ Vanity Fair,

the-lam.

Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.’

Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.”

Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

Michael Shnayerson, “The Fall of Cuomolot: Inside the IIl-Fated Kennedy-Cuomo Marriage,’
Vanity Fair, March 31, 2015, https://www.vanityfair.>com/news/2015/03/cuomo-kennedy-
cuomolot-marriage.

Katy Forrester, “Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Was a Guest at Andrew Cuomo’s Wedding & Private
Lunch; The US Sun, November 2, 2021, https://www.the-sun.com/news/3948010/ghislaine-

Shnayerson, “The Fall of Cuomolot.’

71

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Forrester, “Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Was a Guest
Forrester, “Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Was a Guest
“London Watch: Oldfield Party,’ Women’s Wear Daily, December 4, 1990, 16.

Debbie Lord, “Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell, Companion of Jeffrey Epstein?,” WFTV, July 2, 2020,
https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/who-is-ghislaine-maxwell-conpanion-jeffrey-
epstein/NVSLGQYODVGVDOU25GY4FIEDJA/; “Ghislaine Maxwell: The British Socialite,
Tycoon’s Daughter and Friend of Jeffrey Epstein,’ Sky News, July 2, 2020,
https://news.sky.com/story/Ghislaine-maxwell-focus-turns-to-british-socialite-in-the-wake-
of-jeffrey-epsteins-death-11784582; Tom McCarthy and Daniel Strauss, “Ghislaine Maxwell
Arrest Sends Tremors through Epstein’s Celebrity Circle,” The Guardian, July 2, 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/02/ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-
celebrity-circle.

“Photo: Ghislaine Maxwell Says Hello to John Kennedy Jr.” Spy, March 1993, 75,
https://books.google.com/books?id=FltmGUfHBkgC.

Alex Osmichenko, “Ghislaine Maxwell Hooked Up Sexually With JFK Jr.” OK Magazine,

m

m

sexual-hookup/.

Osmichenko, “Ghislaine Maxwell Hooked Up.”

Nancy Collins, “New Questions Arise About Mary Richardson Kennedy’s Suicide,’ The Daily
Beast, May 16, 2013, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/16/new-questions-
arise-about-mary-richardson-kennedy-s-suicide.

Collins, “New Questions.’

Jason Burke, “Carlos Mavroleon,’ The Observer, August 19, 2000,
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2000/aug/20/features.magazine47.

Burke, “Carlos Mavroleon.’

Burke, “Carlos Mavroleon.’

David Ignatius, “The French, the Cia and the Man Who Sued Too Much,’ Washington Post,

the-cia-and-the-man-who-sued-too-much/d81e2a2b-96e7-4a75-8680-1a76b24c9f36/.
Whitney Webb, “Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-
Linked Firm,’ Unlimited Hangout, July 21, 2020,
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/07/reports/alleged-salas-family-assailant-previously-
worked-for-us-israeli-intelligence-linked-firm/.

Robin Pogrebin, “John O'Neill Is Dead at 49; Trade Center Security Chief)’ New York Times,

at-49-trade-center-security-chief.html.

M.L. Nestel, “Ghislaine Believes Disgraced Tycoon Dad Was MURDERED, Her Brother Reveals,”
The US Sun, June 26, 2021, https://www.the-sun.com/news/3160152/ghislaine-maxwell-
believes-dad-roberts-drowning-was-murder/; Thomas and Dillon, /srael’s Superspy, 301.
Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.”

Webb, “Meet Ghislaine.’

90

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111

Wendy Leigh, “JUST LIKE Her Daddy; With a Ruthless Ambition Worthy of Her Father,
Ghislaine Maxwell Has Clawed Her Way Back from the Brink of Ruin,’ Daily Mail (London),

JUST-LIKE-her-daddy_-With-a-ruthless-ambition-worthy-of.pdf.

Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 526.

“Maxwell Scandal: The Report — Family: Widow's Modest Life,” The Mirror, March 31, 2001, 4.
Fearon, “How Ghislaine Rose From the Ashes.”

CNET News staff, “Magellan Cofounder Finds Email,” CNET, February 21, 1997,
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/magellan-cofounder-finds-email/.
Po Bronson, “On The Net, No One Knows You're a Maxwell,” Wired, February 1, 1999,
https://www.wired.com/1999/02/maxwell/.

“Voyaging around Her Father, the Hi-Tech Maxwell,” The Observer, October 8, 2000,
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2000/oct/08/theobserver.observerbusiness.
CNET, “Magellan Cofounder.’

Bronson, “On The Net.’

CNET News staff, “MSN to Use McKinley Directory,’ CNET, December 18, 1995,
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/msn-to-use-mckinley-directory/.

Sharon Wrobel, “Serial Entrepreneur,’ The Jerusalem Post, August 24, 2006,
https://www.jpost.com/Business/Business-Features/Serial-entrepreneur; Katie Hafner, “The
Perils of Being Suddenly Rich,’ New York Times, April 21, 2007,

2976079.php.
Bronson, “On The Net.”
William Cash, “The Sins of the Father,’ Evening Standard (London), November 21, 2003,

Nigel Rosser, “What Happened to the Maxwell Women,’ Evening Standard (London), March
30, 2001,

75315251/what-happened-to-the-maxwell-women.

Sissons, “Mysterious Business.”

Newsroom, “Misery in the Maxwell House,’ The Scotsman, November 16, 2001,
https://www.scotsman.com/news/misery-maxwell-house-25 10066.

Nigel Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer; She’s the Daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's Manipulating
His Jetset Lifestyle,” Evening Standard (London), January 22, 2001,

THE-DAUGHTER-OF-ROBERT-MAXWELL-AND-1.pdf.
Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”
Klein, “The Sinking of Captain Bob.’

Whitney Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business Series,’ Unlimited Hangout,
https://unlimitedhangout.com/the-maxwell-family-business/.
Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

112 Stephanie Nolasco, “Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Would Do Anything’ to Meet Jeffrey Epstein’s
Demands, Prince Andrew’s Cousin Claims,’ Yahoo News, December 2, 2021,
https://web.archive.org/web/20211203054324/https://news.yahoo.com/ghislaine-maxwell-
anything-aposmeet-180037844.html.

113 Nolasco, “Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Would DO Anything”

114 Robotham, “The mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell's secret love.”

CHAPTER 16

CROOKED CAMPAIGNS

A DONOR TO REMEMBER

he earliest official interaction between Jeffrey Epstein and the Clinton White

House took place in 1993. For Epstein, it would be the first of 17 visits he
would make to the executive residence in just under two years. Epstein’s first visit
took place on February 25, 1993 and he had been invited, per visitor logs, by
“Rubin.” The location of the visit was noted as “WW, for the West Wing. The
Rubin listed here is believed to be Robert Rubin, who at that time was serving as
the director of the National Economic Council (NEC) as well as Assistant to the
President for Economic Policy. The NEC coordinated all economic policy
recommendations that went into the President’s office, meaning that any meeting
between or involving both Rubin and Epstein would have likely related to
economic policy.

If Rubin was indeed responsible for Epstein’s initial entry into the White
House, this is highly significant. Right before taking his post at the National
Economic Council when Bill Clinton became president, Rubin had been serving
as co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, a post which he assumed in 1990. Before that
he was Goldman Sachs’ Chief Operating Officer and its Vice Chairman from 1987
to 1990. That means that Rubin held the top leadership posts at the bank prior to
and during its involvement with Robert Maxwell's theft of hundreds of millions
from his own companies’ pension funds to stave off the collapse of his business
empire.

Goldman Sachs’ role in the financial fraud and illegal activities that directly
preceded Maxwell’s death (and were alleged to have played some role in his
demise) stands out among Maxwell's other banks. Per the official report by
Britains Department of Trade and Industry on the scandals that erupted in the
wake of Maxwell’s death, Goldman Sachs bore “substantial responsibility’ for
allowing Mr. Maxwell to manipulate the stock market prior to the collapse of his
businesses.” In addition, before Maxwell died, “Trade and Industry Secretary
Peter Lilley had received complaints before Maxwell died about dealings between
Captain Bob's other public company, Maxwell Communications Corp, and Wall
Street bankers Goldman Sachs,’ according to The Guardian Rubin, in his role at
the time, likely had knowledge of these shady dealings in the lead up to Maxwell's
death and almost certainly played a major role in dealing with the subsequent

fallout, as Goldman Sachs - along with the UK government and Shearson
Lehman - were tasked with replenishing the stolen pension fund money.*

In summary, one of the top executives of Robert Maxwell’s main bank with
“substantial responsibility” for at least one of his major financial crimes, was the
person to first connect Jeffrey Epstein with the Clinton White House.

Furthermore, Rubin would become Treasury Secretary at the tail end of 1994,
the year where Epstein made 12 of his 17 White House visits. Rubin took over
that post from Lloyd Bentsen Jr., who had previously served on the board of his
family’s Jefferson Savings and Loan alongside Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and
his father, Marcelo Hernandez-Cartaya. Guillermo, importantly, was the figure
behind the WFC Corporation, the CIA-linked drug smuggling and money
laundering operation mentioned in chapter 13 (among other places) in
connection with Leslie Wexner’s business associate, Edward DeBartolo.

At the time Hernandez-Cartaya was added to the board, he was making major
inroads in Brownsville, Texas, a border town close to the Gulf of Mexico.
Brownsville’s local papers reported that Hernandez-Cartaya was part of a crew of
Miami real estate developers planning to transform the town into “one of the most
popular resort areas of the world.”* Two years later, Hernandez-Cartaya bought
Jefferson S&L outright from Lloyd Bentsen Sr.* Law enforcement sources, as well
Texas state regulator Art Leister, told journalist Pete Brewton that Hernandez-
Cartaya was using the S&L as a drug money laundromat.

While Robert Rubin served as Clinton’s second Treasury Secretary, his
deputy was Lawrence “Larry” Summers, who would later take over for Rubin as
Treasury Secretary in 1999 and who, along with Rubin, helped engineer the repeal
of the Glass-Steagall Act. This allowed an economic bubble to inflate, ultimately
resulting in the 2008 crisis. Epstein is also alleged to have played some role in the
2008 financial crisis by apparently helping to instigate the collapse of Bear
Stearns./ As previously noted in chapter 14, Summers also had a close relationship
with Henry Rosovsky, who was intimately involved with the Wexner Foundation
and associated with Jeffrey Epstein at the time.

Summers, whose very close ties to Epstein were also discussed in chapter 14,
was known to have taken at least one of his flights on Epstein’s plane in 1998,
when he was serving under Rubin as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. A 2003
report in the Harvard Crimson, written at the time Summers was Harvard's
president, noted that the two men’s friendship “began a number of years ago —

before Summers became Harvard’s president and even before he was the
Secretary of the Treasury.”8

With respect to Rubin and Summers, it is worth examining a claim made by
Epstein associate Leon Black, of Apollo Global Management. In 2020, Black
claimed that, in addition to himself, clients of Epstein’s included various heads of
state as well as a US Treasury Secretary.2 Though he didn’t name any of those
people, it seems likely that either Rubin or Summers was the US Treasury
Secretary in question.

Around the same time as Epstein’s first Rubin-facilitated White House
meeting, Epstein also officially became a Clinton donor. Indeed, Epstein’s second
visit to White House, which he made alongside Ghislaine Maxwell in September
1993, was to attend a reception for donors who had specifically contributed to
White House renovation efforts, with those efforts having begun in November
1992.

Sometime prior to that reception, Epstein had donated $10,000 to the White
House Historical Association for a specific project to redecorate the White House.
It is unclear when exactly between November 1992 and September 1993 Epstein
would have become a donor. Most likely, he had donated by the time of his first
White House visit in February 1993, if not before, given the Clinton family’s long
association with “pay-to-play” politics.

The project eventually cost nearly $400,000 and was said to have been funded
completely by private donations. Epstein, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell,
attended the donors’ reception, which included a thorough tour of the refurbished
White House.” A photo of the couple greeting the President at that function was
eventually published by the Daily Mail in December 2021.44 Other attendees at
the exclusive reception included Clark Clifford, the former presidential adviser
and Secretary of Defense who was one of the key players in the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International (BCCI) scandal, as previously mentioned in chapter 7.
According to documents related to the event, the point of contact for the event
was the then-White House Social Secretary Ann Stock, who appears in Epstein’s
“little black book” of contacts.

Bernard Meyer, who was then the executive Vice President of the White
House Historical Association, wrote a letter in October 1993 to Epstein, thanking
him for the $10,000 contribution, which Meyer assured him would “assist in
funding the costs of the refurbishing of the Oval Office in the West Wing and

certain areas of the Executive Residence.” A copy of the letter thanking Epstein
was also sent to A. Paul Prosperi, a real estate lawyer who had been a close friend
of Bill Clinton's from their college days.

Prosperi had been intimately involved in the White House Historical
Association's fundraising at the time of the redecoration-related donations in
1993. He was sent copies of thank you letters to other attendees aside from that
addressed to Epstein and is identified by Meyer as the recipient of the donations.
Like Epstein, Prosperi had donated $10,000 to the redecoration effort personally.

According to The Daily Beast, which first unearthed the donor dinner records
in 2019, Prosperi likely facilitated this early Epstein-Clinton connection, not only
due to the aforementioned, but also due to the fact that Prosperi’s close
relationship with Epstein persisted well past this event, and even continuing after
Epstein’s first arrest in 2006. Indeed, while Epstein was serving his initial prison
sentence in Palm Beach, FL, Prosperi visited him at least 20 times. Prosperi was,
notably, a real estate attorney in the Palm Beach area. Just a few years after he
served as a “bundler” for this 1993 fundraiser, in 1996, Prosperi was indicted for
embezzling $1.8 million from a client. His prison sentence was subsequently
commuted by Bill Clinton during his final hours in office.8

Prosperi was not the only corrupt Palm Beach-based figure tied to this
particular Clinton fundraiser who would continue to maintain close ties with
Epstein up until his first arrest in 2006. The White House donor reception
attended by both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell also counted C. Gerald
Goldsmith of Palm Beach, Florida as a guest.

In 2009, the New Times of Palm Beach ran an op-ed titled “Palm Beach
Mayoral Candidate Has Corrupt Past in the Bahamas.’** The subject was C.
Gerald Goldsmith, then serving as chairman of the First Bank of the Palm Beaches
and who was then pursuing local political ambitions. The op-ed’s description of
the Florida-born, Harvard-trained businessman as a figure of corruption was
hardly hyperbole. While Goldsmith maintained positions on the boards of new
numerous banks and companies (with an inclination towards the offshore
variety), many of his business partners and contacts came from the underworlds
of organized crime and intelligence.

Goldsmith spent considerable time as an officer at Cosmos Bank, a Zurich-
based bank with branches in New York and numerous interests throughout
Florida and the Caribbean. Like Goldsmith himself, Cosmos straddled the line

between the underworld and the overworld and maintained close ties to the
networks around David Baird and his CIA-linked foundations (See chapter 4).
One of Cosmos’s directors, for example, was Frederick Glass, the vice chairman
and CEO of the Empire State Building Corp. This company was owned by Henry
Crown, the organized crime insider and client of the Baird Foundation in 1961
(see chapter 1). Henry’s son, Lester Crown, was a founding member of the
Wexner/Bronfman “Mega Group”t Crowns Empire State Building Corp. sold
control of the Empire State Building to Lawrence Wien, another Baird
Foundation client and advisor to Moe Dalitz’s Cleveland mob. Since 1959, Dalitz’s
Desert Inn, at the center of the Roy Cohn United Dye case discussed in Chapter
4, had been owned by Wien.12

This wasn’t Cosmos’s only connections to these networks. Loan money from
the bank mingled freely with loans from the mob-controlled Teamster Pension
Fund in the real estate ventures of San Diego development mogul Irvin Kahn.
One of Kahn's business partners in at least several of these ventures with Morris
Shenker, attorney for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa and a controlling figure for the
Teamster Pension Fund in his own right.

Goldsmith himself seemed to have been particularly close to Lansky frontman
(and Baird client) Lou Chesler. When Chesler helped organize the Grand Bahama
Development Corporation (DEVCO), which managed Freeport and helped
transform the island into a hub for organized crime-linked gambling, Goldsmith
was on hand to act as one of the original investors. It was one of at least several
joint business ventures: in August 1961, Chesler and Goldsmith led a group to
buy up a private issuing of stock in a national bowling company called
Consolidated Bowling Corp.18

It would prove to be the connection to the Bahamas, however, that was
responsible for Goldsmith's notoriety. Through a position as head of a company
called Intercontinental Diversified Corp (IDC), a Panamanian company set up by
DEVCO, Goldsmith became party to a series of nearly-incomprehensible
business transactions and political kickback schemes. These revolved around the
strange purchase of DEVCO and the Bahamas Port Authority - by Benguet, one
of the Philippines’ major gold mining companies. Benguet had been taken over by
Herbert Allen, the brother of Chicago developer and Fisher/Taubman business
associate Charles Allen (who, incidentally, was both another Baird client and
himself a DEVCO investor). The Allens were also closely associated with the

business interests of the PROMIS scandal conspirator Dr. Earl Brian. The reason
for the acquisition of the Port Authority had to do with a law in the Philippines
that barred foreign stockholders from controlling Filipino natural resources.
Merging Benguet and DEVCO would allow the Allens to “spin-off” their assets
from the gold holdings, which would then be sold back to Filipino parties.

The way the scheme functioned was essentially as follows: Benguet, steered by
the Allen brothers, took control of DEVCO, and then transferred these assets to
IDC, then headed by Goldsmith. Benguet was then sold to a group of Filipino
businessmen with close ties to — and perhaps front men for — President Marcos.
IDC was then left with DEVCO, the Bahamas Port Authority, and foreign
holdings that had previously belonged to Benguet. The ties of Ghislaine
Maxwell's close friend and vacation escort George Hamilton and Epstein’s client
Adnan Khashoggi to the Marcos family and their suspect financial dealings were
discussed in chapter 15.

If these matters were not already complex enough, there was also the question
of a purported $100,000 kickback to the Bahamas prime minister Lynden O.
Pindling that took place right in the middle of the Benguet transactions. This
payment originated from IDC and passed through Paul Helliwell’s Castle Bank.
The linkages between Helliwell and IDC were many: his law firm was retained by
IDC, while his former partner, Mary Jane Melrose, had gone to work directly for
DEVCO and IDC.

Goldsmith left IDC in 1976. Despite the cloud of scandal hanging over him
he continued to move in elite circles. His name appeared on the 1978
membership roster of the secretive 1001 Club, an exclusive consortium that
ostensibly served as the primary financing mechanism for the World Wildlife
Foundation. Joining him that year were notables such as BCCI founder Agha
Hasan Abedi, members of the Bechtel family, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of
Permindex fame, shipping magnate Daniel K. Ludwig (who had worked closely
with DEVCO in first developing the port at Grand Bahama), David and Laurance
Rockefeller, Mossad banker Tibor Rosenbaum, and Rosenbaum’s close colleague
Edmond de Rothschild.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Goldsmith held directorships in numerous
companies. According to SEC filings these included Innkeepers USA Trust, a real
estate management company with a focus on upscale hotel properties; U.S.
Banknote, a shadowy Delaware company; and the Nine West Group Inc., the

apparel company headed by billionaire Sidney Kimmel. Goldsmith also sat on the
board of Palm Beach National Bank, which he had joined in November of 1990.73

In his book Relentless Pursuit, Bradley Edward charges that Goldsmith
regularly called Epsteins Palm Beach house throughout the early 2000s, as
indicated by message pads purported to have been recovered by Palm Beach
police officers. Corroboration for this claim can be found in Epstein’s black
book, which contains numerous numbers for Goldsmith, including one listed as
the Worth Avenue branch of Palm Beach National Bank. According to testimony,
both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell maintained accounts at Palm Beach National
Bank.”

THE VINCE FOSTER CONNECTION

he White House renovations made possible by the donations of Epstein,

Goldsmith, Clifford and others were the subject of a November 1993 article
in the New York Times, which stated that the redecorated White House reflected
the “personal energy” of the Clintons, “especially in their bold use of color??? It
also noted that the effort to redecorate the White House was particularly
controversial at the time due to its connection to the “suicide note” allegedly
found on the lifeless body of Clinton aide Vince Foster’s earlier that year.

As previously mentioned in Chapter 9, Foster was under government
surveillance at the time of his death and was reportedly distraught over recent
developments tied to the PROMIS scandal/Inslaw affair. However, the death itself
— officially ruled a suicide —- and its immediate aftermath have long raised
suspicions for several reasons.

On July 20, 1993, between Epstein’s first White House meeting and the
September donor dinner, Vince Foster’s lifeless body was found in Fort Marcy
Park. He had last been seen at the White House, yet no exit logs or video footage
show him leaving the premises. At the park, those who witnessed the scene were
surprised by the lack of blood, as Foster was alleged to have shot himself in the
mouth with a revolver, an act that normally results in a messy, bloody death. In
contrast, the amount of blood found at the scene was considered to be minor.

The report produced by Whitewater special counsel Robert Fiske asserted
that those present observed “a large pool of blood” where Foster's head had been,
but other parts of Fiske’s own report contradict this claim and observers of the
scene of death, including medical examiner Dr. Donald Haute, denied ever seeing
a pool of blood.“ Haute, who was the only doctor to examine Foster's body at the
park, was not interviewed for the Fiske report. Haute’s own report was reportedly
improperly and illegally altered, with one page alleging the gunshot had been
“mouth-head” while another alleges it was in fact “mouth-neck.”28 In addition, the
presence of a bullet wound in the neck had been attested to by Richard Arthur, a
firefighter /paramedic who was at the scene where Foster’s body had been found.””

Other oddities include the fact that the murder weapon was unknown to
Foster's wife and family, as he had owned a silver gun, not the black gun observed
in photographs of the scene. Furthermore, the bullet that killed Foster was never

found.*? In addition, the FBI appears to have intervened in the investigation by
telling eyewitnesses not to report that they had seen cars of other people beside
Foster present at the scene. In addition, the FBI was accused of altering the
statements of several eyewitnesses.*+

The autopsy of Foster’s body was also controversial. For instance, Dr. James
Beyer, who performed the autopsy, unexpectedly moved the time of the autopsy
so it took place a day earlier than planned, meaning that he performed much of
the autopsy without observers who had been at the crime scene, as is custom.
When those police observers had finally arrived, Beyer had conveniently already
removed Foster's entire tongue and upper palette, obfuscating evidence of the
alleged “mouth-neck,’ as opposed to “mouth-head,” injury that had been observed
in the field by Dr. Haute.? Beyer had also spoken to Park Police about the results
of X-rays of Foster's body, but then subsequently claimed those X-rays never
existed.*4

Aside from the death, there is the matter of the unauthorized search of
Foster's office that began between the time the body was found in the park at
around 6pm and when Craig Livingston, the director of the White House’s Office
of Personnel Security, identified Foster’s body at around 10pm. It was reported by
Deseret News that “about an hour after White House aides learned of Foster’s death
at 9pm that night, [White House counsel Bernard] Nussbaum, Maggie Williams,
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, and Patsy Thomasson, an aide to the
White House chief of administration, entered Foster’s office”? A secret service
agent had seen Williams “carrying a stack of files from the area of his office”
around this time.

Nussbaum later confirmed that he had been in Foster’s office that evening for
“a brief, 10-minute search.” He disputed interfering with the investigations,
claiming that he was merely “seeking to ‘balance the interests’ of Foster's
privileged communications with the president with the ‘legitimate’ needs of the
police.’52 Nussbaum had made an agreement with the Justice Department that
resulted in the official search of Foster’s office taking place two days after his death,
on July 227438

This unauthorized search may have been related to “a blizzard of phone calls
to and from the first lady and her closest friends and aides soon after Foster's
death.” According to the Washington Post, “Congress has heard flatly conflicting
sworn accounts of what happened during those days [from the first lady and her

friends and aides]. A parade of witnesses have described searches of Foster’s office
while angry police and Justice Department officials investigating his death were
kept at bay. Missing files and documents have been suddenly discovered and
released.”=?

Perhaps one of the oddest phenomena surrounding Vince Foster's death was
his supposed suicide note or “resignation letter,’ which the White House later said
had been found in Foster’s briefcase. For reasons still unknown, the White House
waited to report the note’s existence until about 30 hours after it had allegedly
been discovered.*2 Adding to the confusion is the fact that police had observed
Foster's briefcase as having been empty when his office was searched in the
immediate aftermath of his death.

There was also an unusual amount of secrecy around the note as well, as
photographing the note was forbidden and it was exempt from Freedom of
Information Act requests. However, a copy was subsequently obtained by James
Davidson, editor of a financial newsletter. Davidson arranged for three hand-
writing experts to examine the note and all three judged it to be a forgery.*4
Subsequently released documents found that Hillary Clinton had been the main
person “behind the 30-hour delay in releasing late White House counsel Vincent
Foster’s suicide note to authorities.”#2

Hillary Clinton’s personal involvement is notable, as she is directly mentioned
in the alleged “suicide note.” The note states in particular that “The Usher’s Office
plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki [Hockersmith]
and HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton].’

The New York Times wrote shortly after the note’s “discovery” that this part of
the note referred to “Hillary Rodham Clinton's redecoration plans for the White
House” and cryptically charged that the Usher’s Office, which oversees
renovations, was using those plans against Clinton and her decorator Kaki
Hockersmith.8 A subsequent summary of the note’s contents, published by the
New York Times that November, stated that, in this portion of the note, “Mr. Foster
alluded to cost overruns and schemes associated with the redecorating, which he
did not describe but feared would embarrass the President and Mrs. Clinton.”“+

Given that the “suicide note” was highly suspicious and most likely a forgery,
this would mean that the note, and its assertions about the renovation endeavor,
had been placed there with the intention, not only of being discovered, but of

seeding a particular narrative about the money flows related to the White House
renovation.

The inclusion of this line seems meant to publicly absolve Kaki Hockersmith
and Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing while also casting shade on the Usher's
Office, potentially stopping anyone at that office from advancing accusations
against the First Lady or her associates as it related to financial impropriety that
may have been associated with the redecoration effort. If the note was indeed a
forgery intended to publicly absolve Hillary Clinton and Kaki Hockersmith from
a potential role in financial “schemes” related to the renovation, it would suggest
that the opposite narrative — ie. that Hillary Clinton and the renovation were
involved in suspect financial schemes — was closer to the truth.

This seems more than plausible because, as the New York Times article notes,
“Mr. Foster’s office would have decided whether there was anything inappropriate
about the private funds donated for the renovation” and [his] role was to advise
on the legality of anything relating to the executive office. Had something been
uncovered by either Foster or the Usher's office about the recent donations to the
White House Historical Association? Given that the donors included figures
deeply embedded in shady financial networks, like Jeffrey Epstein, Clark Clifford,
and C. Gerald Goldsmith, it’s certainly possible.

However, soon after the note was made public, both the Usher's Office and
Clinton denied any impropriety had taken place. It was also noted that the sizable
gap between initial cost estimates made by the usher’s office and the final cost was
merely due to a “miscommunication” between the Ushers Office and
Hockersmith, with Hockersmith allegedly having underestimated the cost of labor
and overtime pay. In an August 1993 statement, Clinton stated that this particular
“miscommunication” had since been resolved. Gary Walters, who had been chief
usher since 1986, told the Times in 1993 that he had “no idea what he [Foster] was
thinking when the note was written.”4

This seemingly rapid turnaround from the narrative seeded by Foster’s alleged
note makes it unclear what, if anything, transpired in the relatively short window
of time between that note’s creation and the New York Times report a few weeks
later. Was this “miscommunication” resolved or did the note’s narrative pressure
the Usher’s Office to drop potential complaints? Adding to the intrigue is the fact
that the White House “refused to identify anyone associated with the Historical

” 47

Association fundraising at the time.’ One can only speculate about the White

House’s reasons, though the level of secrecy, the involvement of Epstein/Maxwell
and similar actors as well as the Vince Foster connection strongly suggests that
this particular fundraiser was related to much more than simply the
reupholstering of furniture and the swapping of drapes.

FOSTERGATE

n 1995, journalist James R. Norman, then working as “Forbes ace investigative

reporter” and a senior editor at the magazine, wrote a cover story for Forbes
entitled “Oil! Guns! Greed!”, which centered on Chase Manhattan bank and
allegations relating to “bank fraud, oil trading, and bombs.’ The connections he
uncovered there led him to develop another and arguably much more ground-
breaking investigation, which bore the title “Fostergate.’”

On April 17, 1995, Norman sent a letter to Michael D. McCurry, White
House Press Secretary, the contents of which were later leaked onto the early
internet. In that letter Norman had informed McCurry that Forbes was “preparing
an article for immediate publication” and was seeking comment on several
allegations contained in the reporting, of which there were ten in total. A few of
them deal with Foster’s role with the Jackson Stephens-owned company
Systematics, previously discussed in chapter 9. Those allegations, as Norman
wrote them, were as follows:

1.) That Vincent W. Foster, while White House Deputy Counsel, maintained a Swiss bank
account.

2.) That funds were paid into that account by a foreign government, specifically the State of
Israel.

3.) That shortly before his death and coincident with the onset of severe and acute depression,
Vincent Foster learned he was under investigation by the CIA for espionage.

4.) That this information was made available to him by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

5.) That while he was White House Deputy Counsel and for many years prior, Vincent Foster
had been a behind-the-scenes control person on behalf of the National Security Agency for
Systematics, a bank data processing company integrally involved in a highly secret intelligence
effort to monitor world bank transactions.

6.) That Systematics was also involved in” ‘laundering: funds from covert operations, including
drug and arms sales related to activities in and around Mena, Ark.

7.) That through Systematics’ relationship with E-Systems, Vincent Foster may have had access
to highly sensitive code, encryption, and data security information of strategic importance.

8.) That both prior to and after his death, documents relating to Systematics were removed from
Vincent Foster’s office in the White House.

9.) That the meeting at the Cardozo (Landau) estate on the eastern shore of Maryland on the
weekend before Vincent Foster’s death was attended by, among others, George Stephanopoulos.

10.) That Hillary Rodham Clinton was also a beneficiary of funds from Foster’s Swiss
48

account.-—

The White House responded on April 20, and stated that the allegations were
all “outrageous” and “baseless.” Forbes killed Norman’s story, which was due to be
published in May with the magazine’s editor James Michaels claiming that the
story would not be published because “many of the story’s sources were not
credible” Norman’s story relied on several anonymous sources in intelligence,
including the CIA, and, as can be surmised from the allegations above, centered
around “charges that Foster had been under Central Intelligence Agency
surveillance for selling US secrets to Israel and secreting the proceeds in a Swiss
bank” account.*2 It also alleged that Hillary Clinton had been involved in the
selling of those secrets alongside Foster.

Norman eventually published “Fostergate” in a small magazine called Media
Bypass. After publication there, he wrote to Forbes’ editor James Michaels,
imploring him to reconsider publishing the article in Forbes, where Norman was
still employed. The letter informed Michaels that Norman had obtained
significant, additional corroboration of his reporting. This included “credit card
and airline frequent flier records that VWE [Vince W. Foster] was making periodic
one-day trips to Switzerland” and that “a staffer on Jim Leach’s House Banking
Committee has confirmed, on tape, that VWF had a Swiss bank account.”

Norman continued defending his reporting to Michaels by noting that
“Foster's former executive assistant, Deborah Gorham, has testified under oath in
a private deposition that Foster had her put two inch-thick NSA binders in Bernie
Nussbaum’s safe. This establishes beyond a doubt that Foster had access to
sensitive NSA documents.’ Norman noted that his sources stated that “one of the
binders contained presidential authentication codes required to authorize the use
of nuclear weapons or other significant military action.” Foster did not have the
security clearance necessary to obtain that information, Norman notes, meaning
he “must have gotten them from someone in or close to the oval office.’

Norman identified this “someone” as Hillary Rodham Clinton. In his letter to
Michaels, he states the following:

Pouring gasoline on this fire is the revelation over the past weekend that Lisa Foster, Vince’s
wife, received a mysterious $286,000-plus payment, which came through Foster’s sister Sheila
Anthony, an Assistant Attorney General at the time, just four days before Foster’s death. This
clearly smacks of a hush-money payment. And apparently Foster wouldn't take the bait, despite

being forced into a tight financial bind from the loss of his Swiss funds and probably from
picking up the tab on all sorts of incidental Clinton campaign expenses. Faced with the
likelihood he would be the fall guy for Hillary’s sale of high-level nuclear code secrets to the
Israelis (through Foster), he apparently threatened to dump the whole mess in Bill Clinton’s lap
at a one-on-one meeting set for Wednesday morning, July 21, 1993. But Foster never lived that

long Š}

Norman, writing later that year in Media Bypass, noted that Hillary Clinton
had not only been a probable “beneficiary” of the funds in Foster’s Swiss bank
account, but was also “under suspicion for espionage” at the same time Foster was
under counterintelligence surveillance. He also noted that, “Although Systematics
attempted to prevent the publication of Fostergate in Media Bypass, the company
(Alltel) [formerly Systematics] has not even bothered to demand a retraction of
anything published in the [Fostergate] story. Indeed, I have been told by at least
four sources that senior officials of the company are now hiring criminal legal
defense attorneys, and that Alltel itself is quietly up for sale. The WSJ has offered
to help pick up Media Bypass’ legal tab if they are sued (which is unlikely) 52

Michaels’s response to the letter was to offer Norman two choices: take
indefinite unpaid leave or accept a severance package. Norman resigned from
Forbes in response and his Fostergate investigation was subsequently largely
forgotten. Norman revealed, both in his letter to Michaels and elsewhere, that
major political power players, including Caspar Weinberger had played a critical
role in killing his Fostergate story.

In addition, Norman's sources had notably given him “an encrypted code
(KPFBMMBODB) for an unknown Swiss account” as a means of corroborating
their information. Norman then gave this code to a government employee, likely
working for intelligence as their name is redacted, “who either gave it to one of his
colleagues or personally decrypted the number and hacked his way into the
account at Union Bank of Switzerland in Berne. They removed $2.3 million, and
then left a note with the decrypted account number in the account holder’s
mailbox in Maine.” Norman notes that it was subsequently revealed to him that
the bank account had belonged to Weinberger himself. He wrote that “The source
of this account number was the trunk of arms/drug smuggler Barry Seal’s car. A
copy of documents from a suitcase in that trunk is attached. The clear implication
is that Caspar Weinberger, while Sec. of Defense, was taking kickbacks on drug
and arms sales”$ Barry Seal’s activities in Mena, Arkansas, and beyond were
previously discussed in chapter 8.

In addition, Mellon bank, which was also a key part of Norman's investigation,
had donated to the ill-fated presidential campaign of Forbess controlling
stockholder and editor-in-chief Malcolm Forbes. When Norman had sent a letter
to bank executives in connection with his Fostergate investigation, Malcolm
Forbes reportedly received numerous calls, urging him to kill Norman’s story.*

Norman also reported in Media Bypass that another senior editor at Forbes,
Dana Weschler Linden, had previously been a director at Boston Systematics,
which was “loosely affiliated with the Systematics in Arkansas and run by her
father, former CIA operative Harry Weschler.’ Boston Systematics’ two Israeli
subsidiaries were, incidentally, run by Weschler Linden’s cousins.

After Norman's report was killed, one of the people he contacted was the
economist and writer J. Orlin Grabbe. Grabbe began his own investigation,
producing an online series entitled “Allegations Regarding Vince Foster, the NSA,
and Banking Transactions Spying.’ Only fragments of Grabbe’s original series
remain on the internet today. Grabbe’s investigation corroborated key
components of Norman's reporting and he followed some of Normans leads even
further. He also utilized at least some of the same sources that Norman had used
in composing Fostergate. One of them, Chalmer “Charles” Hayes, was the subject
of a records request in 2021 and the FBI refused to release any of its files on
Hayes, saying it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the requested
documents.’=2

For instance, Grabbe was provided “evidence that said that one of the things
stolen [by Foster] through White House channels were Presidential
authentication codes (generated daily by the NSA), by which the President
identifies himself in the event of nuclear war. There was also a notebook giving all
the global and regional nuclear options - a menu of pre-arranged military
scenarios — that the President could select. This information had been sold to
Israel.”>4

Grabbe reported that a Mossad agent was with Foster and in his apartment
during his final hours. He wrote that “a woman with brownish-blonde hair” had
accompanied Foster into his apartment after he'd left the White House the day he
was murdered. He notes “that this apartment is Foster’s is confirmed both by the
landlord and by banking records of Foster’s rental payments. The front entrance to
Foster's apartment was being videotaped as part of an on-going national security
investigation into espionage by members of the White House. The woman in the

tape has been identified as an Israeli agent.” This videotape referenced by Grabbe
did not record the exit of Foster and the woman, only their entry, suggesting they
left via the apartment's “back entrance.’

However, Grabbe’s investigation found it unlikely that this woman had been
responsible for Foster’s death, which would mean their meeting was likely related
to the Fostergate allegations regarding Foster and espionage on behalf of Israel.
Grabbe’s investigation instead pointed to a “Bush plumbers unit” that continued
to operate after Clinton's election as having been responsible for Foster's death.
Grabbe notes that Foster’s murder had been sloppy and had “taken place under
emergency conditions — a spontaneous, last-minute solution when Vince Foster
failed to react in expected fashion to a $286,000 attempted bribe.”

He goes on to relate how the details of his death and the events surrounding it
indicate that Foster’s murder seemed to take the Clintons and other key figures at
the White House by surprise. One of the alleged members of this “Bush plumbers
unit,’ Robert Goetzman of the FBI, reportedly admitted to Debra von Trapp, a
computer expert who worked in the Bush administration, while drunk that he had
been involved in Foster’s death. He reportedly said “We dumped him [Foster] in a
queer park to send Clinton and his queer wife a message.”=° von Trapp had
recorded the conversation and that tape eventually made its way to special counsel
Kenneth Starr (who would later become one of Epstein’s defense lawyers). Starr
did nothing with the tape and some speculate that he may have destroyed it.-2

Given the factionalism in the Reagan and Bush eras, this is not outside the
realm of possibility. However, it is also important to note that some have
speculated that Goetzman’s drunken confession was part of an effort to misdirect
and take the heat off of the Clintons as it related to Foster's death.

After Grabbe’s investigation into Fostergate and other issues, he was smeared
by 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl as a source of “misinformation” online and an example
of why Americans should not read reporting outside of mainstream media outlets,
which are now owned by a small handful of companies and many of which are
controlled by the intelligence-organized crime networks profiled in this book.

Stahl’s segment sought to portray Grabbe, a Harvard-trained economist and
former assistant professor of economics at Wharton Business School, as a loony
“conspiracy theorist” without making an effort to factually challenge any of
Grabbe’s reporting. In an earlier version of the current establishment rationale for
online censorship, Stahl argued that interest in Grabbe's reporting was indicative

of the danger of allowing “just anyone” to post content onto the internet.2 60
Minutes may have had a vendetta against Grabbe’s reporting on Fostergate as he
had written, as part of that series, that 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace (an attendee of
parties on the Lady Ghislaine) had been paid $150,000 by the Democratic
National Committee to attack reporters who questioned the official narrative that
Foster had committed suicide.“ At the time of Wallace’s segment and Stahl’s
segment, CBS, which produces 60 Minutes, was owned by Mega Group member
and OSS veteran Laurence Tisch, who was then also acting as CBS’s CEO.

If we are to believe the reporting of James Norman and J. Orlin Grabbe, then it
may be worth re-examining a few things. First, the White House Historical
Association fundraiser. Not only did this fundraiser include people like Jeffrey
Epstein, BCCI-linked Clark Clifford, and C. Gerald Goldsmith, it was directly
mentioned in the forged “suicide note” that was most likely created with Hillary
Clinton’s direct involvement. If both Hillary Clinton and Foster were under
investigation for espionage at the time, and Foster's death was connected to the
reason for that investigation — i.e. the involvement of Foster and Clinton in selling
secrets to Israel — one would assume that Clinton would attempt to absolve herself
from anything that could lead to her involvement in those espionage activities
being outed.

As previously stated, the only mention of Clinton in Foster’s “suicide note”
directly relates to the White House Historical Association fundraiser. These pieces
of evidence, when considered together, suggests that the fundraiser may have been
connected to either Systematics’ role in PROMIS-facilitated money laundering or
Foster’s and Clinton’s alleged Israeli espionage activities (or potentially both).

However, it seems that these espionage activities involving Foster and Hillary
Clinton were not only limited to selling state secrets to Israel. As detailed in
chapter 9, James Norman had noted in his book, The Oil Card, that it was
suspected (though unproven) that other foreign governments aside from Israel
had bought “high-level code, encryption, and other secrets via Foster’s Swiss bank
account and Israeli banks.’®* Per Norman, chief among the suspects of those
foreign governments was China. As will be noted in subsequent sections of this
chapter, there is substantial evidence that some Israeli espionage activities during
this period were related to efforts to funnel US secrets, as well as sensitive US
technology, to China.

However, before broaching those issues in greater detail, it’s important to note
that another Arkansas company tied to Systematics was, throughout this period,
engaging in sensitive business dealings with China. The company in question was
Arkansas Systems, which was located “just down the road” from Systematics in
Little Rock and was founded in 1975 by a former Systematics employee and Army
veteran, John Chamberlain. Norman's reporting in Fostergate makes brief
mention of Arkansas Systems, noting that it “was one of the first companies to
receive funding from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, an agency
created by then Gov. Bill Clinton that is now coming under congressional
scrutiny.”°+ ADFA and its significance was discussed in chapter 8.

Arkansas Systems was founded in 1975 and described itself as “a privately held
provider of card systems, payment systems, and operations solutions through
Integrated Transaction Management (ITM), a comprehensive system
architecture.”© Like Systematics, Arkansas Systems focused on selling software to
banks. Its software was used extensively on “remote teller terminals and ATMs”
both domestically and abroad.®° According to the company’s founder, John
Chamberlain, Arkansas Systems “assisted with file conversions and some
consulting on the Systematics financial management system” in connection with
Systematics’ “processing [of American Express’s] military banking contracts.’
Chamberlain claims to have been the developer of Systematics “financial
management system.”&

Arkansas Systems was also involved in tech transfer due to its role in the
“export of encrypted software and hardware” and lobbied for the removal of
“export controls on software and hardware containing the DES algorithm,” which
the company framed “as needless red tape.”

Norman's Fostergate report noted that the company did considerable business
in Asia and Eastern Europe, including in Russia and China. Chamberlain has
stated that both his company and Systematics were “doing business in Moscow at
the same time.’ In 1994, Arkansas Systems reached an agreement with China’s
central bank, the People’s Bank of China “to provide regional clearinghouses in
three major Chinese cities” The company would specifically “provide check
processing software converting the Chinese banking system from a paper-heavy
operation to a high-speed electronic system.” The American Banker reported at the
time that “the clearinghouses are being established in Nanjing, Shenyang, and
Harbin” and that these “sites will serve as regional clearing centers for the People’s

Bank of China, which controls more than 100,000 branches nationwide”4 The
report then notes that “similar clearinghouses are planned for 76 other regions.”
Given Arkansas Systems’ connections to ADFA and Systematics, it is entirely
possible that the company’s software enabled US intelligence or other parties to
spy on financial transactions or its software was being used to facilitate financial
crimes, such as money laundering.

Instrumental to Arkansas Systems’ ability to secure this deal with Chinas
central bank was the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade
Administration (ITA). Notably, working at ITA at that time, was a man connected
to powerful Clinton donors involved in large-scale, highly suspect banking
activities — Jackson Stephens and the Riady family (see chapter 8). His name was
Johnny Huang. At ITA, Huang had access to classified information and made
regular “mysterious” visits to Stephens Inc's DC offices, while also focusing
specifically on ITA issues relating to China. Huang would later become a central
figure in the Clinton-era scandal sometimes referred to as “Chinagate.’ One of the
other key figures in Chinagate, Mark Middleton, a White House staffer, would
incidentally be the man who facilitated most of Jeffrey Epstein’s 17 White House
visits.

CHINAGATE

T Epstein’s donation to the White House Historical Association would not
be his only Clinton White House connection that was intimately tied to alleged
corruption and financial “schemes.” Not long after his first (official) donation in
1993, Epstein gained great access to the White House, meeting with Mark
Middleton, then-special assistant to Thomas “Mack” McLarty, in the White
House itself on several occasions. The subject of those discussions and their
duration remain unknown. McLarty was initially Clintons Chief of Staff, a
position he held until mid-1994, when he became Counselor to the President and
Special Envoy for the Americas. Middleton, a former Little Rock lawyer with ties
to the Clintons prior to 1993, was reportedly chosen by McLarty to serve as his
assistant after observing Middleton's role in fundraising for the 1992 election.

Epstein visited the White House 15 times after his attendance of the
September 1993 donor reception. Most of those visits occurred in 1994, with only
one meeting taking place in 1995. He notably visited the White House twice on
one day during three separate dates throughout 1994.

Many of those 1994 meetings appear to have been with Middleton or other
individuals working in the Chief of Staff’s office, namely Karen Ewing, as visitor
logs show that Epstein had often been signed into and out of the White House by
Middleton or Ewing and, on one occasion, Ann Stock. The Daily Mail, which
reported on the visitor logs in late 2021, cited sources stating that it was likely that
Epstein met directly with Clinton during a handful of these 1994 visits.

One of Middleton's main duties at the White House, per a 1999 report from
the House Committee on Government Reform, was being “in contact with many
prominent business people and contributors to the President,’ with Epstein falling
in the latter category at this time. Middleton’s name would later appear in Epstein’s
little black book of contacts.

Middleton, who had raised $4 million for Clinton’s first presidential
campaign, would leave the White House in 1995, but continued to maintain close
ties with the White House, as he controversially kept using his White House
business cards and maintained a voicemail on the White House telephone system
long after he officially lost his job there. A source cited by the Daily Mail and
familiar with Middleton's role at the White House at that time stated that “Mark

knew that Epstein was managing the money of Les Wexner [... ] The year 1994
there were midterm elections, Clinton needed money and Mark thought he could
get some of Wexner’s money.’

Middleton was closely associated with John “Johnny” Huang, who raised
millions of dollars from illegal or questionable sources, some tied to the Chinese
government, for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Middleton’s
involvement in that illegal fundraising would become known after those funds
came under scrutiny following the 1996 presidential election. One of those
“questionable” fundraising sources would later tell the FBI that Middleton had
received tens of thousands of dollars from him prior to Middleton's departure
from the White House. When Congressional hearings were conducted into the
scandal over 1996 election financing, Middleton pleaded the Fifth Amendment
on 28 occasions, including in response to the question asking if he was an agent of
influence for a foreign government.2°

One of the reasons why Middleton likely pled the Fifth on so many occasions
is the fact that there is much more to the story involving his association with
Huang, as their relationship ties back to the corrupt power base that helped
Clinton first become Arkansas’ governor and, later, the nation’s president. Huang,
in particular, was deeply enmeshed in the business interests of Jackson Stephens
(whose companies included Stephens Inc., Systematics Inc., and Beverly
Enterprises) and Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group. Riady and Stephens forged a
multi-decade working partnership in the early 1980s that would then act as a hub
of political cronyism in Arkansas, meaning it was also intimately tied to the
political rise and fortunes of the Clinton family. The Riady-Stephens relationship,
their role in BCCI and in the corruption surrounding the Clinton-launched
Arkansas Development Finance Authority were discussed in detail in chapter 8.

Huang was a career banker, working first at the American Security Bank in DC
before moving to Kentucky in 1979 to work for the First National Bank of
Louisville A few years prior to Huang joining that bank, the First National Bank
of Louisville had partnered, alongside two other banks, with Guillermo
Hernandez-Cartaya’s World Finance Corporation (WFC Corp) to establish a
Panama-based bank called Unibank. WEC’s extensive ties to drug trafficking and
organized crime was discussed in chapters 7 and 13 and WFC’s ties to the Savings
and Loans run by Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen Jr. and his
father were referenced earlier in this chapter. Unibank served as a vehicle for First

National Bank of Louisville and other banks to make massive, multi-million dollar
loans to Colombian businesses.”

The association between First National Bank of Louisville and WFC Corp
continued at least through 1977 and First National was also closely linked with
the political fortunes of John Y. Brown, Kentucky's governor from 1979 to 1983
and who was known to law enforcement as connected to organized crime
interests.

In 1981, Huang went to work for Union Planters National Bank in Memphis,
Tennessee.*4 Union Planters of Memphis was one of the shareholders in a
company formed in 1980 called Turks and Caicos Banking Company Ltd. The
other shareholder in this company was Jean de la Giroday, whose ties to Bank
Cantrade and John Singlaub’s GeoMiliTech were discussed in Chapter 7.

Huang then relocated to Hong Kong in 1983 to manage that bank’s Far East
branch. In Hong Kong, Huang became connected with James Riady, Mochtar
Riady’s son, and he went on to work for the Riadys in 1985, taking a position as
Vice President at a Hong Kong bank controlled by the Riadys as well as at
Worthen Bank. As previously mentioned in Chapter 8, Worthen Bank was
deeply enmeshed in the Stephens-Riady web of businesses/banks. C. Joseph
Giroir, head of the Rose Law firm, also held significant amounts of Worthen stock
and had a spot on Worthen’s board, while Rose Law firm represented Worthen. It
would be through Worthen that Mark Middleton would first connect with both
Huang and the Riadys.8

Huang’s ties with the Riady family soon deepened and he became president
and COO of the Riady-controlled Lippobank of California in 1986, a post he held
until 1988. That year, Huang moved to New York City and became general
manager of Bank Central Asia, in which the Riadys were also heavily invested.**
He returned to California in 1990 to serve as president of the US operations of the
Lippo Group. Throughout late 1991 and early 1992, Huang personally worked on
the negotiations of the Lippo Group’s failed attempt to purchase and rescue
BCCT’s Hong Kong branch.®=

In late 1991, Huang had his first known association with the DNC, having
planned “the Hong Kong/Lippo portion of the trip” of a DNC delegation that
traveled to Asia and was hosted by the Riadys. The head of that delegation was
then-DNC chairman Ron Brown, who would later become president Clinton's
Secretary of Commerce. The Riady’s Lippo Group scheduled several meetings for

the DNC delegation, including an apparent fundraiser hosted by Huang as well as
other fundraising events. The fundraiser hosted by Huang, per DNC officials,
included “wealthy Asian bankers who are either US permanent residents or with
US corporate ties.”®° A congressional report found that “although there were
several fundraising events scheduled, the DNC is unable to account for any
contributions which may have been raised in conjunction with the Hong Kong
trip.’®2 It is important, here, to point out that foreign nationals cannot legally
contribute to US election campaigns.

In addition, Huang’s top position in the Lippo Group meant that Huang
oversaw a series of real estate holding companies which donated heavily to the
Democratic Party in 1992 and 1993. $50,000 was donated to the DNC Victory
Fund by one such company, Hip Hing Holdings, in August 1992. The other
contributions, made by three separate Lippo-controlled companies and totaling
$50,000, were made to the DNC in September 1993. Somewhere in this time
frame, Huang was given a “favor” by the Clinton administration “in the form of a
top-secret security clearance” that Huang received “while still a private citizen.”®8
This was reportedly because Commerce Department head Ron Brown had a
“critical need for his [Huang’s] expertise.” Ron Brown was courted extensively by
Huang as well as the subject of the next section, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie.

Per a congressional report on the matter, “at the time of the election, Huang
began pursuing an appointment through Clinton’s transition team.” Not long after
Clinton took office, Maeley Tom, who had previously worked for the DNC, wrote
to Clinton’s Deputy Director of Personnel to recommend Huang, stating that
“John [Huang] is the Riady family’s top priority for placement because he is like
one of their own”8? Maeley Tom was hired right after Clinton’s election to serve as
the Riady family’s liaison to the Democrats. James Riady himself was notably
placed on a list of “must consider” appointments for the new administration.
Congressional investigators noted that Riady “was interested in placement on a
commission or advisory council dealing with international trade or banking%
Riady was ultimately not appointed but another associate of Riady’s as well as
Huang’s, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, was appointed to such a commission under
dubious circumstances.

In December 1993, Huang was approved for a position at the Department of
Commerce. There, he served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for
International Economic Policy in the Department’s International Trade

Administration (ITA), but did not officially assume his post until July 1994.24 A
few months after he was approved, in February 1994, James Riady hosted a
luncheon for Commerce Department officials who were traveling in Indonesia.
Among the attendees were Commerce undersecretary Jeffrey Garten and Deputy
undersecretary David Rothkopf, who were the superiors of Huang’s soon-to-be
boss at the Department, Charles Meissner.”

Upon joining ITA, Huang officially left his position at the Lippo Group,
receiving $780,000 in salary and bonuses.” Huang reportedly obtained his job at
ITA with the help of Maria Haley, who was on the board of the Export-Import
Bank of the United States and who was friendly with C. Joseph Giroir, who had
become the Riady’s main business partner and lawyer in the United States.” His
superiors at ITA reportedly deemed Huang unqualified for the work being done at
ITA and, as a result, he was often kept out of the loop, aside from matters dealing
with Taiwan, in which he was intimately involved. Notably, while at the ITA,
Huang somehow had managed to enjoy “frequent access to classified information
relating to China.”

About a month after Huang joined the ITA, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown
embarked on a trade mission to China, returning “with a $1 billion power-plant
project to be financed by the Lippo Group and managed by Entergy Corp., a
Louisiana-based concern with heavy interests in Arkansas” According to TIME
magazine, Commerce officials claimed that Huang recused himself from any
matters involving Indonesia due to his ties to the Lippo Group, but congressional
investigators later found documents which revealed that Huang, while at ITA, had
attended “meetings at which officials from several federal agencies discussed ways
to strengthen trade relations with Indonesia”

While at the Department of Commerce, Huang also kept in close contact with
Riady associates like Giroir as well as Webster Hubbell, a Rose Law firm lawyer
then serving as Associate Attorney General. Notably, when Hubbell was forced to
resign his post at the DOJ under the cloud of scandal in 1994, he was offered a
consulting job immediately after by the Riady family as well as by a company
owned by another Clinton mega-donor, Ron Perelman.

During this same period, Huang continued to remain closely connected to the
interests of Jackson Stephens as well, maintaining a “secret office across the street
from Commerce” that was located in the Washington DC offices of Stephens Inc.
Huang was reportedly using this “secret office” on behalf of the Lippo Group and

a subsequent Congressional inquiry would note that “Huang’s purpose in visiting
Stephens DC so regularly remains a mystery? %2

As previously mentioned, ITA worked closely with the Systematics-related
company, Arkansas Systems, specifically on its sale of software to the People’s
Bank of China. Huang was quite possibly involved in this matter, given that
Arkansas Systems was funded by ADFA and tied to Systematics — both of which
were connected to Jackson Stephens of Stephens Inc. As was just noted, Huang
mysteriously visited Stephens Inc’s DC offices regularly while at ITA. In addition,
Arkansas Systems largest market was in Indonesia, which hints at a possible
connection to the Riadys. If Huang was involved with Arkansas Systems’ sale of
software to China's central bank, it would lend support to the theory that that
software may have been part of an effort to spy on financial transactions that was
similar to (or potentially related to) what Systematics had done for the NSA.

Aside from these “mysterious” dealings, Huang began soliciting
“contributions to the DNC, thereby violating the Hatch Act” while still at the
Commerce Department. At the time, the DNC attempted to obscure Huang’s role
in these contributions by fudging records so that Huang’s wife was identified as
the source of the funds. By 1995, Riady partner C. Joseph Giroir, who had been
donating $200,000 to the Democrats annually since 1993, began lobbying then-
national chairman of the DNC, Don Fowler, to hire Huang. Also lobbying on
Huang’s behalf was Mark Middleton, “special assistant to the President and
Deputy to Counselor Mack McLarty.”28

While Middleton worked at the White House, Huang and Riady met with
him frequently. Between March 1993 and October 1996, James Riady went to the
White House 20 times, while Huang - before, during, and after his role at
Commerce — went a total of 95 times during this same period. As congressional
investigators later noted, “some of these visits, for both Huang and Riady, included
visits with the president. [ ... ] On many occasions when James Riady visited the
White House, John Huang accompanied him. Riady was granted private meetings
with the president as well.”22 Many of these meetings also included Middleton1™
Some of the meetings Riady had with the president involved the issue of China
and granting China “most favored nation” (MFN) trading status. Even though
Clinton campaigned against granting that status to China, he reversed his stance
and approved MEN for China in May 1993. Then, in 1994, he delinked MFN
status from China’s human rights record.

Earlier that year, in February 1995, Mark Middleton, just weeks after he left
his White House position, had accompanied James Riady to a meeting in the Oval
Office with President Clinton. The next day, C. Joseph Giroir created a new
corporation, the Arkansas International Development Corporation, as well as a
Caymans-based counterpart called the Arkansas International Development
Corporation II. According to a Congressional report, “Through Giroir and AIDC
II, [the Riady-owned] Lippo [and closely tied to Huang] attempted to gain
influence by hiring people with access to the Clinton administration.” Middleton
was then hired by AIDC II in July 1995, which paid him a salary of $12,500 per
month. +2

On the Riady payroll, Middleton was “supposed to seek out businesses
looking for opportunities in the Asian market, particularly joint venture partners
for Lippo entities?” However, from July 1995 to April 1997, Middleton produced
no joint venture portions for the Riadys, despite being paid at least $262,000
during that time period.+® Middleton’s other jobs for the Riadys included
arranging meetings for James Riady and essentially acting as his exalted errand
boy. While traveling to Asia at the Riady’s behest, Middleton passed out his White
House business cards, even though he was no longer working there. Middleton
somehow was able to maintain a voicemail and phone line at the White House
until October 1996, well over a year after he left, and he also frequented the White
House while employed by the Riadys. He allegedly even gave some of his clients
White House tours during this time.+%

After a meeting in September 1995, attended by the President, Huang, the
Riadys, Giroir, and White House attorney Bruce Lindsey, Lindsey contacted
Huang and asked if he would like to move from Commerce to the DNC. This was
reportedly in response to Huang having indicated that “he thought that he could
raise money in the Asian-Pacific community” for Clinton. The next month, the
DNC’s Don Fowler subsequently made the decision to hire Huang, who then
became the DNC’s “Vice Finance Chairman, a title created for Huang that no
other DNC employee held.”

One of the reasons that Huang’s role at ITA, and later the DNC, was so
controversial was because his former employer, the Lippo Group, had become
increasingly involved with the Chinese government beginning in 1991. The Lippo
Group’s first known business connection to the Chinese government was related
to Lippo’s efforts to rescue BCCI’s Hong Kong branch. That effort, in which

Huang had been personally involved, saw Lippo court China Resources — the
Chinese government’s “agent for all of the PRC’s foreign trade corporations” —
with the intention that China Resources would acquire BCCI Hong Kong.
However, China Resources ultimately backed out of that deal 1%

Though this effort failed, China Resources purchased 15 percent of the Riady-
controlled Hong Kong Chinese Bank in 1992 and increased their stake in the
bank to 50 percent in mid-1993, “paying 50 percent over market price of this
stock, more than a $125-million premium.” Around that same time, China
Resources “infused the flailing LippoLand with tens of millions of dollars,
effectively bailing out the Riady family.’ In the years that followed, the Lippo
Group and China Resources grew even closer, partnering on “dozens of shared
development projects throughout” mainland China.12°

According to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst named Nicholas
Edtimiades and an investigator with the Senate Government Affairs Committee
named Thomas Hampson, China Resources is “an agent of espionage, economic,
military and political”! Thus, the fact that China Resources began forging close
ties with the Riady’s Lippo Group after Clinton's election and the fact that this
paralleled Johnny Huang’s own unusual rise through Commerce and into the
DNC gives Huang’s role here increased significance. Indeed, Huang played a
direct role in efforts to connect China Resources to the Commerce Department as
a letter written from Huang to Ron Brown urged Brown to meet with China

Resources chairman Shen Jueren.% During Jueren’s visit to the US, Huang and

Riady also arranged a meeting between Jueren and then-vice president Al Gore
Several controversial and illegal fundraisers followed Huang joining the DNC.
One of the most controversial was “an intimate gathering of four wealthy
businessmen, their families, and President Clinton” hosted at the Jefferson Hotel
in July 1996. One of those businessmen was James Riady. Three of the four
businessmen, including Riady, were not American citizens and could not legally
contribute to Clinton's election campaign. One of those non-citizens, James Lin,
the chairman of a construction company in Taiwan and then a member of
Taiwan's National Assembly, was also the co-founder of a California company that
was fined $41,000 for “laundering campaign funds to Los Angeles City Council
candidates.” 2
Other fundraisers that garnered controversy involved both Huang and a

woman named Maria Hsia, who had co-founded the Pacific Leadership Council

with Huang, the Riadys, and others in 1988. Hsia was also close to Al Gore and
his political fundraising efforts. Another fundraiser directly involved James Riady
— the 1996 fundraiser hosted at the Los Angeles homes of MCA mogul Lew
Wasserman where Riady was listed on a DNC “commit list” even though he was
ineligible to donate. Another figure, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie who had befriended
Clinton in Arkansas, had served as a proxy to donate large sums of money from
foreign nationals based in Taiwan and mainland China to the Clinton-Gore
campaign.

THE TRIE TEAM

Yu Lin “Charlie” Trie was born in August 1949 and, later on in life, would

claim four different birthdays, making it difficult to know exactly when or
even where he was born. This is due to a “number of unexplained discrepancies”
on his birth and immigration records. Though he was often reported to be
Taiwanese, documents provided to the US Congress by the Taiwanese
government list him as having been born in China before immigrating to Taiwan
at age 16.144 Trie immigrated to the US in 1976 and settled in Little Rock,
Arkansas. Two years later, he co-owned a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, called
Fu-Lin, with his sister.

Trie began donating to the Clinton family in 1982, two years before he
became a citizen. Trie’s contributions seem to have been a factor in then-Governor
Bill Clinton becoming a “frequent guest of Trie’s restaurant” H3 By 1988, the ties
between Trie and Clinton seem to have deepened, with Trie referring to Clinton
as “Lao Ke,” which roughly translates as “Big Boss.” Clinton, during his re-election
campaign, would refer to Trie as his “close friend” of more than two decades.+

Not long after Trie began donating to Clinton’s gubernatorial campaigns in
the 1980s, he became involved with the Riadys. Trie first waded into the Riady
swamp in 1983, when he became friends with Antonio Pan, who was then
working for United Pacific Trading Inc., a subsidiary of the Lippo Group. Pan later
became executive vice president of Lippo’s Chinese subsidiary, the Tati Group.
Sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trie became acquainted with James Riady,
who would later give Trie a $60,000 loan in 1985 so Trie could “expan[d] his
restaurant operations” H6

In late 1991, Trie sold his restaurant and created an import-export business in
the US called Daihatsu International Trading Corp and began making frequent
trips to China. A Senate report found that Trie had consulted Clinton about his
plans and Clinton then urged him to create such a company and later sent him a
letter of congratulations after the company was founded.” During his trips to
China, Trie would play up his connections to Bill Clinton and touted it, on several
occasions, to prominent Arkansas businessmen as well as Arkansas state auditor
Julia Hughes Jones. Jones would later, at Trie’s behest, arrange for meetings
between then-president Clinton and high-ranking Chinese government

officials 18 During this period, Trie would bring eight delegations of prominent

Chinese officials and businessmen to Arkansas and elsewhere in the United States.
Despite his frequent and extremely costly trips and his Clinton ties, Daihatsu
struggled to secure even a single successful business venture.

Trie’s activities eventually caught the attention of a Macau real estate
developer with ties to the Chinese government named Ng Lap Seng. Allegedly
born into dire poverty but somehow also managing to bribe his way into the then-
Portuguese enclave of Macau, Ng Lap Seng was a wealthy businessman by the
time he forged a connection with Trie. Their first public interaction centered
around what would ultimately be a failed joint venture to purchase and revamp
the dilapidated Camelot Hotel in Little Rock. Assisting Trie and Seng in that
failed venture was C. Joseph Giroir. 2

Congressional and media reports alike have questioned how Ng's
transformation from peasant to mogul was accomplished, as his “rag to riches”
story is improbable without some sort of outside intervention. Per the “official”
story, Ng somehow went from being little more than a beggar to a multi-
millionaire solely by “selling bales of cheap cloth” to garment factories.22 A
former associate of Ng’s interviewed in 1996 by congressional investigators
claimed that Ng’s transformation occurred because, for reasons unknown, he “had
been selected to act as a front for municipal and provincial authorities in the
People’s Republic of China.”! By the time he teamed up with Trie, Ng was also a
part of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory board
that worked with the Communist Party of China.

By the early 1990s, Ng’s holdings in Macau included the Fortuna Hotel,
described as “where the Communist Party partied, a massage-table dance-karaoke
spot for the Chinese military and supposedly Triad gangsters,” specifically the Wo
On Lok Triad. Other allegations of Ng’s “criminal ties in Asia” that were
unrelated to Fortuna had also emerged during Ng’s and Trie’s failed effort to
acquire the Camelot hotel.

One Fortuna advertisement from the period specifically highlighted the main
“attraction” at Fortuna:

Attractive and attentive hostesses from China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia
and Burma, together with erotic girls from Europe and Russia, certainly offer you an exciting

and unforgettable evening with friends or business associates, 223

Macau, during this period, was a hotspot for prostitution and sex trafficking
and this official description of Fortuna, as well as its organized crime association,
suggests that it was the site of such activities. This is also likely because of its
description as being a “massage-table dance-karaoke spot,’ as — even today — sex
work in Macau frequently occurs in massage parlors, where it is “de facto legal” “4

A 2007 US State Department report noted the following in this regard:

Macau is a transit and destination for trafficking of women for the purposes of commercial
sexual exploitation [... ] Women are deceived or misinformed with promises of work in tourism
or commerce, come to Macau and instead they see themselves in an organized net of saunas and

massage parlors which are in fact brothels.125

After Ng and Trie failed to acquire Little Rock’s Camelot hotel, Trie moved to
Washington DC to open up a new branch of his export-import business Daihatsu.
Trie’s decision to do so is odd because his company, at the time, had still made
essentially no money. This trend would continue well after he opened a DC
branch for Daihatsu, with a Senate investigation finding that “Daihatsu made little
or no money at any time.’ In addition, the report also noted that, at the time, “Trie
and his wife had very little income from other sources.” 2°

Trie chose a rather interesting location for Daihatsu’s DC branch - an
apartment in the Watergate complex. Trie allegedly chose the Watergate because
he believed it would give him “a certain stature” in the DC area. However, for
those in the know in DC, and as noted back in chapter 5, that same Watergate
apartment complex, around two decades prior, had once hosted a call-girl ring.
Daihatsu did hardly any legitimate business at the time, but its DC “office” at the
Watergate was used, not just by Trie, but also by Ng Lap Seng as well as Ng’s
bookkeeper Keshi Zhan and former Lippo Group executive Antonio Pan, who
was — by this time — sporting business cards listing him as “CEO” of Daihatsu.

The Watergate location was used mainly to host parties for Chinese
delegations and Trie’s local political contacts, including Mark Middleton and
other prominent White House and DNC officials. In addition to Middleton,
particularly close to Trie was Jude Kearny, Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Commerce, who also attended these parties at Trie’s Watergate apartment. Given
the apparent links of Ng’s Macau holdings to sex work, and potentially sex
trafficking, one is left wondering if the Watergate apartments had again become
the site of blackmail and influence operations.

Then, in October 1994, Trie incorporated a company in Arkansas on Ng's
behalf, San Kin Yip International Trading Company. It was officially involved in
the “export [of] chemicals, machinery and advanced technology” but subpoenaed
bank records showed “neither earnings nor any genuine business activity.”
Notably, Ng’s main Macau-based company at the time was named the San Kin Yip
Group.

Shortly thereafter, Trie incorporated San Kin Yip (USA) Inc., which also
“neither made money nor engaged in any actual business activity.’ Another
company incorporated by Trie in 1996, American Asia Trade Center “also never
made money” per Senate investigators. All of these apparent shell companies,
however, would donate to the 1996 Clinton campaign.

Despite having no income and several shell companies to his name, Trie was
somehow responsible for donating large sums to the DNC and 1996 Clinton
campaign. Investigators determined that Ng Lap Seng must have “fun[ded] all of
his [Tries] DNC contributions”! Indeed, between 1994 and 1996, with
negligible income from his company Daihatsu, Trie and his businesses received
$1.5 million in foreign wire transfers, $1.1 million of which were directly from Ng
Lap Seng. Upon receiving these large sums of money, Trie “shuffled” the money
“among a total of six domestic [bank] accounts” in an effort to obscure its
origins. Of the other $400,000 in foreign wire transfers, a large sum came from
a Hong Kong entity named Lucky Port Investments Limited. Antonio Pan was a
director of Lucky Port at the time of the wire transfer and LippoBank Los Angeles
had “served as an intermediary for the transaction” 2

In addition to his donations to the Democrats, Trie was also involved in
fundraising for the 1996 election on behalf of the DNC. By 1995, Trie became a
member of the DNC’s Finance Board of Directors, where he sat alongside Edgar
Bronfman.“2 Several of these fundraisers courted Commerce Department
personnel, specifically Ron Brown.

One such fundraiser took place in October 1995 at Hong Kong’s Shangri-La
hotel. There, Ng and Trie organized a dinner where Commerce Secretary Ron
Brown was introduced to “a number of foreign business leaders.’ The dinner had
been “consciously taken off” Brown’s schedule during his Asia tour. During the
event, Trie and Antonio Pan, who was also in attendance, then solicited donations
for the DNC from the guests, none of whom were eligible to contribute. Many of
the wealthy guests in attendance “attended [other] fundraising events with Trie

just months after this event”“4 One of the attendees of this event, Wang Jun,
described by the Chicago Tribune as “China's premier arms dealer,’ later attended a
presidential coffee with Trie and was photographed with president Clinton. Jun’s
background and weapons company is discussed in-depth in the next chapter.

A few months later, Trie and a “boatload” of guests attended the DNC’s “top-
level African-American fundraiser” at the Car Barn in Washington, DC. Some of
the guests had previously met with Ron Brown at the Shangri-La hotel. Video
footage revealed that Ron Brown remarked to president Clinton, as Trie’s group
was breaking up, “this is part of the Trie team,” to which the president responded
“yes.” Those remarks, later described as “cryptic” by investigators, suggest that
Brown and Clinton were familiar with Trie and his associates and did not find it
odd that so many foreign nationals were attending a fundraiser where they could
not legally contribute funds.

Aside from the events themselves, a significant amount of Trie’s “fundraising”
involved Trie soliciting donations to the DNC from third parties who were
reimbursed with money from Ng Lap Seng shortly after their donation. Senate
investigators described these third parties as “alternate conduits for the flow of
Ne’s foreign-source funds to the DNC”/%3 Some of these donations were
specifically solicited so that Ng could “pass the gate” and attend functions at the
White House.

Both Ng and Trie “passed the gate” several times, making 10 and 22 visits to
the White House between 1993 and 1996, respectively. Many of their White
House visits, as had been the case with Johnny Huang, were with Mark
Middleton. Ng may have been giving Middleton large amounts of cash during
some of those meetings. As noted by the House investigation into Trie, Ng
“imported large amounts of cash into the United States shortly before each of his
meetings with Trie and Middleton” at the White House, with the amount of cash
ranging from $12,000 to $200,000.14 Given that Ng’s stays in the US were short
and were centered around visiting the White House, it seems likely that at least
some of this cash ended up in Middleton's hands.

Middleton traveled with Trie extensively while on the Riady payroll. During
one of these trips, Middleton allegedly sought a large (and illegal) donation from
a top member of Taiwan's ruling KMT party.85 On another trip, Middleton was
seen “holding court” in a suite at Hong Kong Grand Hyatt hotel, where he “had 8
to 10 businessmen and government officials from mainland China in his suite, all

of whom were waiting to meet Middleton. Middleton was holding private
meetings in a bedroom adjoining the suite” Both Ng and Seng were present on
this occasion.

In addition, Middleton also worked closely with Trie’s planning of suspect
fundraisers in relation to the 1996 election. Middleton, along with close Clinton
friend and Lehman Brothers banker Ernie Green, “emerged as [one of] Trie’s
principal political and business confidants” while also “act[ing] as Trie’s
Washington liaison”! Green later went into business with Trie, allegedly in a
venture based around “self-inflating novelty balloons.’

Trie extensively promoted a real estate project in Macau to his White House
contacts, specifically Green and Middleton, both of whom “expressed interest” in
the project verbally as well as in writing. The project was called Nam Van Lakes,
and the House investigation revealed that the project was co-owned by Ng Lap
Seng and “Macaus Ho brothers.’ The most well-known of the Ho brothers,
Stanley Ho, was mentioned in chapter 8 in connection with his business dealings
with the Riady family as well as his ties to figures deeply involved in the illicit gold
trade.

Ho, like Ng, was both closely connected to Chinese political power as well as
Macau organized crimes, i.e. the triads. Ho served on China's Standing Committee
of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top
advisory council.+%2
Consultative Conference. In addition, his family had a long history with Jardine
Matheson & Co., the Anglo-Hong Kong trading house controlled by the British

intelligence-linked Keswick family. The Keswick’s intermingling with the Hong

Ng was also a member of the Chinese People’s Political

Kong-based Sassoon family, who were connected to the illicit opium trade, was
discussed in chapter 1.

Stanley Ho was also the top casino magnate in Macau, “the Las Vegas of Asia,”
until his de facto monopoly ended in 1999. His ties to organized crime have been
noted in official reports in the US, Australia and elsewhere? According to a
report from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, “numerous
governmental and regulatory agencies have referenced Stanley Ho's associations
with criminal enterprises, including permitting organized crime to operate and
thrive within his casinos”+42

The Nam Van Lakes project was deemed “one of the largest private investment

projects to have been undertaken since July 1991,” and was planned to be around

130 hectares in size! It is unknown if there were other ulterior motives behind

Trie’s promotion of the project to the White House aside from efforts to secure
financing.

The following year, in 1996, Trie was added to the Commission on United
States Pacific Trade and Investment Policy. Objections to Trie’s appointment were
numerous and well-substantiated, as his English was poor, his businesses were
unsuccessful, and he was generally unqualified to contribute to the commission's
work. Despite this chorus of dissent, Trie was labeled a “must appointment” from
“the highest levels of the White House.”

The other commissioners, in general, were “less than complimentary” about
Trie’s input as part of the commission. He eventually attempted to offer his own
recommendations, which the rest of the commission saw as “superficial,
grammatically deficient, and generally unhelpful”! Trie was a part of
commission when his role in illegal campaign financing surfaced, which saw him
flee to China. Despite the controversy then surrounding Trie, the Clinton
administration never formally revoked Trie’s appointment and he remained a
member until the commission concluded its work in April 1997.1 Congressional
investigations into Trie determined that he, as well as another associate Maria
Hsia — the aforementioned close friend of and fundraiser for Vice president Al
Gore, had “close relationships with the Chinese government and/or intelligence
agencies” 445

Years later, in 2018, Ng Lap Seng, Trie’s accomplice, was sentenced to 48
months in a US prison for attempting “to bribe United Nations ambassadors to
obtain support to build a conference center in Macau that would host, among
other events, the annual United Nations Global South-South Development

Expo. 4

JOHNNY CHUNG

long with John Huang and Charlie Trie, another major player in the scandal

around 1996 campaign financing was Johnny Chien Chuen Chung. Like
Huang and Trie, Chung was granted numerous White House visits, many of
which directly involved Mark Middleton, in exchange for his sizable donations to
the Democratic party, the Clinton/Gore re-election campaign, and John Kerry’s
campaign for Senate during that same election season. Also like Huang and Trie,
the vast majority of Chung’s donations were illegal as they were of foreign origin.

Born in Taiwan in 1954, Chung immigrated to the US in 1988. In 1992, he
founded a company called Telform Inc. that later developed into Automated
Intelligence Systems Inc. (AISI). The company marketed a “fax broadcast system”
and soon had branch offices in Hong Kong, Washington DC, and China. Soon
after founding Telform/AISI, Chung came into contact with the Clintons.

His claims about their initial meeting is bizarre — per Chung, he flew to Little
Rock from Los Angeles after watching Clinton and Bush debate and having an
epiphany — that “political candidates and governments send out more faxes than
private companies.” After landing in Little Rock, he was — in late 1992 — able to
approach the governor's mansion unimpeded. There, he “banged on the door”
and “was fortunate enough to meet Hillary Rodham Clinton and pass her some
information.”“4

A few months later, in April 1993, Chung - at this point just a random
businessman who had knocked on her door — received a letter from Hillary
Clinton, which stated that he was “already on the right track” and wished him luck
with his “innovative system.” Chung used his letter from the First Lady to
convince California Governor Pete Wilson to adopt his company’s “fax broadcast
system,” and Wilson became his first client“ By the spring of 1995, Chung’s
company served 48 state government offices as well as federal agencies.

Chung began visiting the White House in February 1994, and quickly gained
access to “the highest levels” of White House staff, ostensibly to sell his fax
broadcast services. Among the White House documents handed over to
congressional investigators was a page of handwritten notes about AISI with a
notation stating “First Lady — if we don’t use Johnny Chung we're in trouble.’
Though the White House did not ultimately use Chung’s service, Chung did take

many photographs of himself with the Clintons, vice president Gore, and others —
and used them in a promotional brochure to market his company’s services
throughout the public and private sectors.

Chung’s contributions, on a few occasions, intersected directly with events
hosted or planned by Ernie Green, Charlie Trie, and others mentioned in the
previous section(s).4*° On at least one occasion, he met with the same person at
the White House at the same day and time that Johnny Huang was also meeting
that same individual (who is referred to as “Lewis” in White House visitor
logs).*** Like Charlie Trie, Chung received millions ($2.4 million to be exact) in
foreign wire transfers during the period he made his controversial campaign
donations. During this same period, he co-founded eight corporations where “no
business was conducted” with six prominent and very wealthy Chinese
businessmen. The alleged purpose of these companies was to provide those
prominent foreigners with easy access to a US visa and/or permanent residency.

In February 1995, Chung began planning the trip of a delegation of “very
important and powerful business leaders from China” to the White House. Chung
sought the aid of Mark Middleton to arrange the delegation’s meeting with the
president and also sought to have the delegation meet with Vice President Al Gore
and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. A month later, Chung donated $50,000
and was awarded a meeting with Hillary Clinton, who had apparently jumpstarted
Chung’s career in the first place. Chung reportedly said, in response to this
episode: “I see the White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open
the gates,”154

He had apparently made the donation at the behest of Hillary Clinton's top
aides. After he sought “VIP treatment” for the delegation at the White House, “he
was asked to help the First Lady defray the cost of White House Christmas
receptions.”}®5 A staff assistant of Clinton’s at the time, Evan Ryan, claimed that
she “had some debts with the DNC” and solicited the money from Chung,
allegedly on behalf of Maggie Williams, then Hillary Clinton's chief of staff.+54
This explanation deserves as least some scrutiny because, as noted previously,
Hillary Clinton's “defraying” of the cost of White House redecorating had resulted
in a controversial fundraiser involving Jeffrey Epstein, Clark Clifford and others,
and had also been mentioned in Vince Foster’s “suicide note.” Thus, it appears that
Hillary Clinton's “fundraising” efforts for seemingly innocuous First Lady-related

activities seemed to have been linked, on more than one occasion, to suspect
individuals, including foreign intelligence assets.

Hillary Clinton’s office subsequently assisted Chung in taking his Chinese
delegation to president Clinton's radio address, where several pictures were taken
of the delegation with the president. Some White House staff raised concerns
about these pictures, worrying that their release could “embarrass the
president” Chung used his influence with the DNC to “vigorously pursue” the
release of the pictures. He secured their release only after he paid $125,000 to
attend a fundraiser at the home of the Mega Group’s Steven Spielberg.

These pictures were apparently picked up at the White House by Gina
Ratcliffe, an intern in Hillary Clinton’s office who had been offered a “dream job”
by Chung and who accompanied him to China a few days later. Chung had also
attended the fundraiser of Spielberg's mentor, Lew Wasserman, which James
Riady also attended. After the event, a DNC director wrote him, stating “Thank
you for your help in making the event at Edie and Lew Wasserman’s home such a

success.” 156

That same DNC director, Kimberly Ray, also wrote identical letters to
two Chinese businessman who had attended despite being unable to legally
contribute and had wired large sums of money to Chung’s company a week before
the fundraiser.

Like Charlie Trie, Chung also solicited numerous “straw donors” who were
reimbursed by Chung or his foreign national associates after donating. It is worth
mentioning that Trie also nearly became a business partner of Chung’s. According
to the Washington Post: “Trie and his Macao-based financier Ng Lap Seng tried to
broker a deal with Chung in which they would buy the rights to market his fax
business in China,” but Chung ultimately declined the offer.°2

Chung’s access to the highest levels of government did not stop at the First
Lady’s office. Acting on behalf of major Chinese corporations, such as state-
owned oil company Sinopec, Chung secured meetings with the Secretary of
Energy Hazel O’Leary and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. The most
controversial Chinese businessman that Chung assisted in his influence efforts
was a woman named Liu Chao-Ying, the vice president of China Aerospace
International Holdings, a Hong Kong subsidiary of the state-owned China
Aerospace corporation. During investigations, it emerged that Liu Chao-Ying’s
father was, at the time, “the most senior general” of China's military and “one of

seven members of China’s all-powerful ruling party standing committee” 18 He is

also the man credited with overseeing the modernization program of China's
armed forces.+*?

Chung officially assisted Liu with her efforts to purchase aircraft parts from
US suppliers and to raise capital from US financiers. He also incorporated a
division of her company, Marswell Investments, in California and the two
explored using it in “phone parts and telecommunications ventures,” though it
appears the company never did any business.1

Chung later admitted that the funds he had received from Liu Chao-Ying,
who “held the military rank of lieutenant colonel in the Chinese military,’ had
originated from Chinese military intelligence and were funds explicitly intended
to influence US elections.1% Chung specifically stated that, in his presence, Gen. Ji
Shengde, the head of China's military intelligence, “informed Liu that he would
wire $300,000 to her and she was to transfer it to Chung. Chung said that Ji also
told Liu that he required a receipt ‘in order for me to report [the expenditure] to
the [intelligence] agency?” 162

Chung’s testimony also implicated Mark Middleton, the Clinton aide who
had assisted Huang, Riady, Trie, and Ng as well as Chung. Chung stated that Liu
Chao-Ying told him that Middleton had also been given funds from Chinese
military intelligence, over half a million dollars, “to do good things for China.”1®3
The payment to Middleton, per Chung, had been made through an unknown
group in Singapore.

Around the same time the illegal campaign finance scandal (i.e. Chinagate)
emerged, an American business partner of another China Aerospace subsidiary,
Great Wall Industries, came under investigation for illegally transferring advanced
technology to China. That company, Loral Space Systems, is notable as, during
this very election cycle, the largest (legal) donor to the Clinton re-election
campaign was Loral’s CEO — Bernard Schwartz.

Schwartz's activities will be revisited in the next chapter alongside Wang Jun —
the arms dealer aided by Charlie Trie - as both were involved in technology
transfers of dubious legality to China during this period. For now, it is important
to note that Schwartz paid $100,000 to the DNC in 1994 and subsequently
appeared to be rewarded with a spot on Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane
to China. The New York Times reported that “On the plane, Schwartz said he asked
Brown if he could arrange a private meeting with Zhu Gao Feng, the vice minister

of China’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications” and another prominent

telecommunications official. As a result of that meeting, Loral won “a deal to
provide cellular telephone service to China.’

In February 1996, a failed rocket launch revealed that Great Wall Industries,
the China Aerospace subsidiary, had obtained a commercial satellite from Loral
that “led to accusations of an unauthorized transfer of missile technology to
China”4®> After donating heavily to the DNC in 1996, Schwartz subsequently
pushed for “the transfer of satellite export approval from the State Department to
the Commerce Department,” which Clinton granted.+° As Schwartz’s donations
kept flowing, president Clinton continued to sign off on Loral’s exports of
satellites containing sensitive technology to China. It was later revealed that “the
president was warned that approving the launching could be seen as letting Loral
‘off the hook on criminal charges for its unauthorized assistance to China’s ballistic
missile program,” yet he continued to sign waivers for Loral1°&2

Schwartz, like those in the illegal campaign finance scandal (i.e. Chinagate),
had mainly used his wealth and campaign donations to secure favors; favors which
enabled his company to transfer sensitive technology to China. In doing so he —
like Huang, Riady, Trie, and others - focused specifically on the Commerce
Department, especially the then Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Given what
has already been detailed in this chapter, it appears that the main thrust of
“Chinagate” and suspect donations made during this campaign cycle were focused
on changing US trade policy so as to enable the increased export of sensitive
technology to China. This helps explain why Ron Brown and the Commerce
Department were the prime targets of this extensive influence operation.

CRASH IN CROATIA

QO: April 3°¢, 1996, just as “Chinagate” and its effort to specifically influence
the Commerce Department were beginning to come to light, tragedy struck.
USAF CT-43, a US military plane operated by the 76" Airlift Squadron of the
86" Airlift Wing from the Ramstein airbase in Germany, crashed while en route to
Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Officially, the cause of the crash was attributed by investigators to “failure of
command, aircrew error, and an improperly designed instrument approach
procedure” — in part because of an unfamiliar “1930s-era navigational system”

maintained by the airport and a lack of “proper training” of the pilots.4© In his
speech following the crash, President Clinton stated that it had been a “peculiar
mix of circumstances,’ before adding that “if only one or two little things had
happened, the crash might not have happened.” Three days after the crash, the
head of navigation at the Čilipi Airport, Niko Jerkui¢, was found dead, shot in the
chest. His death was ruled a suicide.”

The list of those killed in the USAF CT-43 crash was significant. Onboard was
Commerce Secretary Ron Brown himself as well as Kathyrn Hoffman, his special
assistant. There was also Charles Meissner of the Commerce Department’s ITA,
who had been Johnny Huang’s superior at Commerce. Meissner wasn't the only
one from ITA to have died in the crash. A number of other ITA personnel —
Stephen Kaminsky, Bill Morton, Lawrence Payne, and Naomi Warbasse — were
killed, as was an “economic reconstruction expert” from the CIA's Balkan Task
Force, James Lewek. All these individuals were in Croatia for a trade mission that
was set up “not only support U.S. business interests, but to assist and enable the
development of a newly independent Croatia? +2

Almost immediately following the crash, anomalies were found by US
military investigators who had arrived quickly on the scene. Most of these focused
on Brown himself: he bore, for example, a perfectly “circular hole” in his skull.4
Steve Cogswell, the deputy medical examiner for the Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology (AFIP), would later repeatedly refer to this hole as an “apparent
gunshot wound.” Cogswell further noted that “Brown had a .45 inwardly
beveling circular hole in the top of his head, which is essentially the description of
a .45 caliber gunshot wound” (“inwardly beveling” means that the interior of the

wound is larger than the surface of the wound, which is consistent with gunshot
wounds). Others, including AFIP forensic photographer Kathleen Janoski,
agreed that by all appearances the hole was caused by a bullet +

Air Force Col. William Gormley, who carried out the first examination of
Brown’s body, disagreed with Cogswell’s insistence on the hole’s gunshot wound
characteristics — citing most specifically the lack of any exit wound elsewhere in
Brown's head. Gormley, however, was not authorized to carry out an autopsy on
Brown's body. No subsequent autopsy was ever performed.

There was also the question of strange elements that were found in X-rays
taken of Brown’s head. Around the wound were what appears to have been metal
fragments, which itself is consistent with instances where bullets begin to break
apart and shed metal upon impact. Kathleen Janoksi would later tell journalist
Wesley Phelan that, according to Jean Marie Sentell, a criminal investigator for the
Navy, the original X-rays of Brown’s head were “deliberately destroyed because
they showed a lead snowstorm” — the technical term for the fragmenting of a
bullet inside a body.+£

The deaths of Brown and his colleagues in April 1996, weren't the only strange
deaths to befall the Commerce Department that year. Months later, on November
30", the body of Barbara Alice Wise was found in her office.‘ Wise had worked
for over a decade as an “industry analyst in ... the office of materials, machinery,
and chemicals” within the ITA, which “provided analysis of industries designed to
boost export sales.’+ Though bruises were found on her body and “no outward
sign of any cause of death” was noted by investigators, Wise’s death was quickly
determined to be a result of natural causes. 2

As for Brown, at the time of the plane crash, he was involved in not one but
two legal affairs related to the Commerce Department. The first was the Judicial
Watch suit against the Commerce Department in connection with John Huang, in
which Brown “was a material witness ... noticed to testify.’+82 The second was an
independent counsel probe. Nolanda Hill, a close associate of Brown, reported
that Brown had told her he was going to negotiate a “plea agreement” with the
independent counsel and, shortly thereafter, was “asked unexpectedly to travel to
Croatia.”181

The independent counsel probe involved a small Hohokam energy company
called Dynamic Energy Resources. Yet, it appears that the inquiry was on track to
link that company’s affairs — and its connection to Brown - to the wider networks

involving the activities of Huang, the Riadys, and Jackson Stephens within the
Clinton administration.

Dynamic Energy was closely tied to the Brown’s Commerce Department. For
example, Brown’s son Michael had been placed on Dynamic Energy's board and
had received a number of rewards — including “a five percent stake” in the
company and a “$60,000 golf club membership”! Meanwhile, Helen Yee,
mother of Commerce Department insider — and close Huang associate — Melinda
Yee, was also placed on the board of Dynamic Energy and received company
stock.183 Melinda Yee herself accepted “at least two trips” from Dynamic Energy
between 1994 and 1996, neither of which were reported on her government
financial disclosure statements as required by law.** Then, there was Trisha Lum.
The daughter of Dynamic Energy’s owners, Nora and Eugene Lum, Trisha was
given a job at Brown’s Commerce Department.185

Brown himself had close ties to the Lum family. According to the Washington
Post, Nora Lum and Brown had become acquainted during his tenure as DNC
chairman (around 1989 or so), and the Lums had become major Democratic
Party fundraisers during the 1992 election cycle18° Following meetings with
Brown that year, the couple had organized the DNC’s Asian Pacific Advisory
Council (APAC) — a fundraising and outreach body whose events had been
attended by Huang There are allegations that APAC was used by the Lums to
move illegal donations into the Clinton campaign. According to APAC fundraiser
Charles Chidiac, Nora showed him a “grocery bag containing cash at APAC’s
offices one day in October 1992. The money was in stacks of $100 bills” and
allegedly amounted to $50,000.88

Intriguingly, Chidiac had earlier been named an un-indicted co-conspirator in
the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro “arms for Iraq” affair (discussed in chapter 7).1°2
Chidiac, described in testimony as someone who presented himself as being
“connected with US intelligence services,’ had engaged in fraudulent financial
transactions with BNLs troubled Atlanta branch via his company, Selco East
Consultants.122 Selco East was also the subject of considerable controversy in the
UK, when it was discovered in the late 1980s that Chidiac had used the company
to court Conservative MP John Browne, a close advisor to Thatcher on Soviet
issues. Together, Chidiac and Browne lobbied for companies looking to do
business in the Middle East.2+ Subsequently, Chidiac turned his attention
towards Hawaiian real estate, and it was there that he encountered the Lums.

It was immediately following the APAC fundraising and the subsequent
election of Clinton that the Lums set up Dynamic Energy. It was a shady deal from
the beginning: The Lums “had no experience in the oil and gas business” and it
“was not clear where [they] got the money” for their new enterprise.” One of
their partners was Stuart Price, a Clinton campaign official who later testified that
“he was invited into [Dynamic Energy] by a friend at the Democratic National
Committee”? Price was the son-in-law of George Mitchell, then serving as
Senate Majority Leader. Later, Mitchell would be identified by Virginia Giuffre as
one of the men that Jeffrey Epstein forced her to have sex with.

Accusations soon arose that the Lums were using Dynamic Energy as little
more than a glorified apparatus for funneling money to politicians, as well as
themselves. The company’s coffers were used by Nora to “pay more than $3
million for dividends, unearned consulting fees, and outside investments,
including a Honolulu condominium unit and a California stereo manufacturer. +
According to the FBI, the Lums were “alleged to be facilitators and conduits for
payments from private individuals involved in real estate developing to public
officials” +2 Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department, when Webster Hubbell was
still Associate Attorney General, turned a blind eye toward the Lums. When
Hubbell was asked about the family during the course of the 1996 inquiry, he and
his lawyers declined to comment.

The capstone of Dynamic Energy’s activities involved a contract with
Oklahoma Natural Gas (ONG), a major supplier of natural gas to Oklahoma and
surrounding states. Despite having no oil and gas holdings at the time, Dynamic
Energy and ONG entered into negotiations over an arrangement where Dynamic
Energy would supply ONG with gas at a rate that exceeded the market price. This
deal, according to a subsequent lawsuit, would lead to $65 million in overcharges
to be paid by ONG customers./2° In other words, the wealth that was being
accrued by the Lums and their cohorts was being milked from the American
public.

ONG had ties to another energy company operating in the Midwest, Arkla
Inc. While they had turbulent relations during the 1970s, by the late 1980s and
1990s, the two companies had developed a collaborative relationship. For
example, the pair were building Oklahoma’ largest natural gas pipeline, which
would help provide ONG gas to Arkla and its customer base” Arkla itself had
been previously tied to the fortunes of the Stephens family. In 1956, it had been

acquired by Jackson Stephens’ brother, Witt Stephens, who at the time was the
controlling figure in Stephens Inc. After taking over Arkla, Witt left Stephens Inc.
in Jackson’s hands. The family held control of Arkla until sometime in the
1980s.

Arkla also had ties, beyond the Stephens connection, to the circles around
Clinton. During the course of the Clinton administration confirmation hearings, it
was revealed that Webster Hubbell held Arkla stock and was personally familiar
with the company’s president.“? Even more important, however, was the role
played at the company by Mark Middleton’s boss, Clinton chief of staff Thomas
“Mack” McLarty. From 1983 through 1992, he had served as Arkla’s chairman and
CEO.

During the height of its negotiations with ONG - which surely would have
had ramifications for Arkla - Dynamic Energy went about acquiring another oil
company called the GAGE Corporation. This was presumably done to obtain the
gas reserves needed for the ONG deal, and there is evidence to suggest that the
Clinton administration personally intervened to ensure that the acquisition took
place. Nolanda Hill later stated that she was present when Ron Brown made a call
to McLarty where they discussed “a glitch in the timing of the GAGE deal and the
need for bridge financing to keep the deal from falling apart”? Around the same
time, Hill said, Brown had a meeting with Hillary Clinton where the GAGE deal
and McLarty’s role in it was discussed.

The Lums did end up obtaining the financing it needed, which allegedly came
from the Llama Company. Llama was an Arkansas investment bank set up by
Alice Walton, the heir to the Walton fortunes behind Walmart. As discussed in
chapter 8, Walmart was part of the corporate network tied into the circles around
Hillary Clinton. It was a Rose Law client, and Hillary Clinton herself had sat on
the board of directors of the company for six years.” In documents made public
during the Whitewater hearings, Llama was shown to have been one of the firms
tapped by the ADFA to underwrite the bonds it issued.2%

In addition, Dynamic Energy’s offices were located in the State Bank of Tulsa
building. The State Bank of Tulsa had been owned, since 1991, by Arvest, another
Walton company and where Alice Walton had run the investments division prior

to forming Llama. Dynamic Energy’s move into this building had been

arranged by George Mitchell’s son-in-law, Stuart Price.22°

It’s fairly apparent what was taking place here: Dynamic Energy Resources
seems to have been an attempt to provide rewards, monetary and otherwise, to
individuals linked to the early 1990s “Chinagate” fundraising efforts and the
subsequent activities that were taking place at the Commerce Department under
Ron Brown, and in the ITA in particular. It also appears that when the deal was in
jeopardy due to financing issues related to the GAGE acquisition, the Clinton
administration intervened and used the tools at their disposal, tools they had been
built up through their long history of political nepotism. The simultaneous probes
into shady fundraising and into the relationship between Brown and the Lums
likely would have revealed the full extent of this corruption, and could have
unraveled much more. In light of this, the deaths of Brown and a number of high-
ranking ITA employees in the crash USAF CT-43 — as well as the anomalous
wound on Brown’s head - raise troubling questions.

Remarkably, this isn't the only death that appears in close proximity to the
Lums and Dynamic Energy. There was also the case of Ron Miller, the former
owner of GAGE until the company was sold to the Lums. Shortly thereafter,
Miller began to cooperate with authorities, supplying information to the FBI and
Congressional investigators concerning the Lums family and their activities. This
included 165 tape recordings he had made with the Lums and other Dynamic
Energy principals. In late 1997, Miller died following a short illness that was
described by the Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office as “respiratory distress
syndrome due to undetermined etiology,” although it was ultimately written off as

207

a death from natural causes.“ Yet, prior to his demise, Miller and those close to

him had reported that he was being followed and had received death threats.2%

EPSTEIN AND MIDDLETON

As from the sudden death of Ron Brown and other Commerce officials,

Mark Middleton - a central figure in the campaign finance scandals of the
mid-1990s — would also, years later, suffer a grisly fate. He died on May 7, 2022 at
a ranch in Arkansas owned by Heifer International, a non-profit whose funders
include Walmart, Blackrock and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.2” Heifer
International is partnered with the Heifer Foundation, and the foundation's board
of trustees is chaired by Martha Brantley, the former Director of Strategy and
Business Development for the Clinton Development Initiative, which is part of
the Clinton Foundation.~2

The local sheriff told media that, at the ranch, Middleton was found hanging
from a tree branch by the neck with a shotgun blast to the chest.244 It was
subsequently claimed by authorities that he had hung an extension cord around
his neck before shooting himself in the chest with a shotgun. Despite the shotgun
blast to his chest, police claimed there “was not a lot of blood or anything” at the

scene. Speculation about Middleton's death grew after an Arkansas judge sealed

all photos, videos, and visual content related to Middleton’s alleged suicide.

Shortly after Middleton's death was reported, it was widely noted that he had
been the official at the Clinton White House to sign off on many of Jeffrey
Epstein’s visits. The full extent of Middleton’s role in facilitating these visits had
been made public only a few months before Middleton’s death, in December
2021.

Thus, not only was Middleton the point man for questionable individuals with
links to Chinese military intelligence seeking to gain access to the White House
compound, he was also the point man for the intelligence-linked Epstein to do the
same. This should be a clear indication that the real “Chinagate” scandal was much
larger in scope than just China and the same can also be said of Mark Middleton's
activities at the time.

While foreign intelligence-linked individuals were gaining unparalleled access
to the Clinton White House through fundraisers, so was another intelligence-
linked individual, Jeffrey Epstein. As previously mentioned, Epstein’s first visit on
- February 25, 1993 — was signed off on by Robert Rubin, who would go on to
serve as Treasury Secretary. Other visits in 1993 included the donor reception

detailed earlier in this chapter as well as other visits signed off by Ann Stock, then-
White House social secretary who also appears in Epstein’s book of contacts, and
Lisa Mortman, then-staff assistant to the director of media affairs.

Epstein began meeting with Mark Middleton in 1994 and it was this year that
the bulk of Epstein’s visits to the White House were made. Several of the visits
during 1994 either list Middleton or Karen Ewing as signing Epstein into the
White House. According to sources cited by the Daily Mail, Ewing “was involved
in sending names of visitors to be cleared by the Secret Service and that Epstein
was there to see Middleton, not her?~/4

In addition, the three days in 1994 where Epstein made multiple White House
visits in a single day were all tied to Middleton. Middleton, from early 1994 on,
seems to have been the main facilitator of Epstein’s White House visits as Epstein’s
final visit, in January 1995, took place just weeks before Middleton resigned. It
was during these visits that Epstein allegedly met then-Senate majority leader
George Mitchell. As previously mentioned, Mitchell was named by Virginia
Giuffre in a deposition as one of the men Epstein forced her to have sex with.

Epstein was notably accompanied by young women, as well as Ghislaine
Maxwell, during several of his White House visits. The first of the women to
accompany him appears to have been a woman named Shelley Gafni, of which
little is known. It was suspected that an Israeli model of the same name had been
the one to accompany Epstein, but she denied this was the case when confronted
by a journalist in early 2022.24

Other women included Celina Midelfart, a Norwegian heiress who was 21 at
the time and had also dated Donald Trump; Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former
girlfriend of Epstein’s who was then 33 and married Glen Dubin shortly before
her White House visit with Epstein; and Francis Jardine, a South African former
model who was believed to be in her 20s; and his one-time girlfriend turned
madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was 32 at the time.2/° Midelfart, Jardine, and
Maxwell were all reported to be Epstein’s “girlfriends” during the 1990s and it
seems their intimate relationships with Epstein may have overlapped. Their
relationships with Epstein are revisited in chapter 18.

Francis Jardine was alleged to have been in a relationship with Epstein in the
1990s, as revealed during the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Jardine flew on Epstein’s
plane 12 times and appears in his contact book. Sometime in the 1990s, Jardine
married John Deuss, the oil trader with deep ties to Marc Rich and Ted Shackley.

Deuss, like Epstein, Khashoggi, and others in this network, had a reputation for
using beautiful young women, usually models, to secure favors and loyalty (as well
as potential blackmail) from business associates.” Notably, Jardine’s address
during this time is listed as being the Ossa Properties-owned apartments at 301
66" Street discussed in chapter 12.

Other women who also appear in the White House visitor logs alongside
Epstein are Jennifer Garrison, Jennifer Driver, and Lyoubov Orlova. Flight logs
from Epstein’s plane confirm that these women were traveling with him at the
time of those visits.” However, little about them is known. Some of them may be
the mysterious women who are in photographs with Epstein that were taken at the
White House. During the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, two framed pictures hanging
on the wall of Epstein’s mansion showed Epstein standing at the podium of the
White House briefing room on two occasions. In one, he is with an unidentified
brunette, and in another with an unidentified blonde.2!2

Jennifer Driver’s visit to the White House with Epstein, which took place on
May 13, 1994 is particularly interesting. Flight logs for that day show Epstein
flying from Teterboro to Reagan National Airport with Jennifer Driver. After their
visit to the White House, the two flew from Washington to Palm Beach, this time
— per flights logs — accompanied by “Mark”?

This Mark was Mark Middleton, as the following day, Mark Middleton
appeared on the flight logs, showing that he accompanied Epstein on his plane
from Palm Beach to Grand Bahama International Airport.”

With both Middleton and Epstein dead, it is exceedingly difficult to determine
the exact nature and extent of their relationship as well as the subject of their
White House meetings. Yet, Middleton's major role in the campaign finance
scandal, as described above, is a critical clue. As it turns out, Epstein and other
unsavory figures tied to Robert Maxwell were also involved in suspect fundraising
and influence efforts during the 1996 campaign season in what is perhaps the
other, less explored side of the so-called Chinagate scandal.

THE DNC AND THE MAXWELL MAFIA

hatever Middleton and Epstein had discussed at the White House,

Epstein’s involvement with the Clintons had grown considerably by the
time Middleton departed the Clinton administration. Roughly a month after
Middleton’s resignation, Epstein was among a “very select group of people,’
fourteen in total, who joined President Clinton for a three-hour dinner at the
home of billionaire Ron Perelman in Palm Beach, FL, in March 1995S.

Ron Perelman, like another close Epstein associate Leon Black, is a veteran of
the infamous corporate raiders of Drexel Burnham Lambert during the 1980s and
prior to its collapse in 1990. Perelman’s business tactics were known to be
informed by his volcanic temper and his ruthlessness, with former Salomon
Brothers CEO John Gutfruend once having remarked that “believing Mr.
Perelman has no hostile intentions is like believing the tooth fairy exists”?

Perelman apparently first became interested in courting influence with the
Clintons after marrying Patricia Duff in 1994. Duff was deeply connected to the
Democratic Party, having worked for Democratic pollster Pat Cadell. Prior to
marrying Perelman, she had been married to movie mogul Michael Medavoy and
had “introduced Clinton to the Hollywood establishment,’ according to the
Washington Post.

As Perelman’s wife, Duff styled herself a leading Democratic fundraiser, with
the 1995 fund-raising dinner being emblematic of that. Also, in 1995, Perelman
attended a $1,000-a-plate dinner in New York for the Clintons, where Perelman
sat across from the President, as well as a state dinner for Brazil's president at the
White House.

For Perelman, his generosity to the Clinton political machine resulted in an
appointment by Clinton to the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center in 1995.
Other, less public gestures from the Clintons were likely, as Perelman offered
much more to the First Family than he appears to have received in return. Perhaps
most notable of Perelman’s favors for the Clintons was his offering of jobs to
scandal-ridden members of their administration, Webster Hubbell and Monica
Lewinsky, in the wake of their respective controversies.*~+

However, after the job offers were publicly reported, both Hubbell and
Lewinsky were let go, though the offers later caught the attention of independent

counsel Ken Starr. Starr never subpoenaed or investigated Perelman or the offers
he had made to Hubbell or Lewinsky and, years later, would be one of Epstein’s
defense lawyers. Perelman would later be listed as a frequent dinner guest of
Epstein’s in the 2003 Vanity Fair profile penned by Vicky Ward and is listed in
Epstein’s black book of contacts.22°

Perelman’s controversial hiring of Hubbell and Lewinsky had been arranged
by Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan, who sat on the board of Revlon, a Perelman-
owned company, while his wife was on the board of another Perelman-owned
firm. Jordan was known as Clinton's “conduit to the high and mighty” and had
taken Clinton to the 1991 Bilderberg conference.” On the decision to hire
Lewinsky following the scandal, a former business associate of Perelman’s told the
Washington Post that “It’s like the Mafia, it’s all done in code,” adding that “I can
assure you that Ronald made the decision to give Lewinsky the job. And I can
assure you he wouldn't want to know why Jordan was asking.”

At the 1995 fundraiser in Perelman’s mansion, other guests besides Epstein
included: Clinton friend and “bundler” A. Paul Prosperi, singer Jimmy Buffett,
Miami Vice actor Don Johnson, actor Michael Douglas’ then-wife Deandra, and
DNC co-chair Don Fowler. According to the Palm Beach Post, guests had donated
at least $100,000 to the DNC to attend the dinner with the President, including
Epstein. This was, of course, part of the fundraising season for the 1996
Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, where the DNC was later under heavy
scrutiny due to illegal fundraising, much of which appears to have been linked to
foreign intelligence operations.

Other notable guests at the fundraiser included Bob Kanuth, an investment
banker who previously served in both the US military and the CIA, and Sylvia
Hassenfeld of the Hasbro family.” Aside from being extremely wealthy due to
her family connections, Hassenfeld was intimately involved in Zionist
philanthropic organizations, serving as the national chairwoman of the United
Jewish Appeal’s women division and holding top leadership posts at related
organizations like United Israel Appeal and the Jewish Agency for Israel. This is
significant as Leslie Wexner was, as previously mentioned in chapters 13 and 14,
one of the largest donors to the United Jewish Appeal and served as its national
vice chairman while also attending closed door meetings with Israel’s top

leadership during this period.”

In addition, all three of these organizations to which Hassenfeld belonged also
had considerable ties to the Bronfman family, particularly Charles Bronfman, who
co-founded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s. In the 1980s,
Charles Bronfman served on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for
Israel; served as honorary President of United Israel Appeal’s Canada branch and
built a coalition with the United Jewish Appeal via the Charles and Andrea
Bronfman Foundation to create Israel Experience Inc., an initiative to send Jewish
teens to Israel founded in 1993.232

In addition, Bronfman’s foundation has donated millions to the Jerusalem
Foundation, where Hassenfeld served as vice chairwoman.2* The foundation had
been founded in the late 1960s by Teddy Kollek, the former mayor of Jerusalem
whose ties to the organized crime and intelligence-linked Bruce Rappaport were
detailed in chapter 3. Bronfman would lead both the United Jewish Appeal and
United Israel Appeal after those organizations merged in 1999 with the Council of
Jewish Federations to form what is now called the Jewish Federations of North
America. Soon after the merger, Bronfman became its first chairman of the board
and served in that capacity until 2001.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Edgar Bronfman, Charles's brother, was
on the DNC’s Finance Board of Directors during this campaign season. In
addition, other members of the Mega Group were involved with major
fundraising events during this controversial election cycle, namely Steven
Spielberg. Spielberg, as well as his organized crime-linked mentor Lew
Wasserman, hosted fundraisers that played a role in the activities of Johnny Chung
and Johnny Huang, respectively. Also discussed earlier in this chapter was the fact
that the Mega Group’s other co-founder, Leslie Wexner, has been alleged to have
been courting influence at the White House at the time via his “protégé” and
money manager, Jeffrey Epstein.

It is certainly telling that all of Epstein’s earliest documented interactions with
the Clinton White House revolved around controversial fundraising, including
illegal fundraising tied to foreign influence campaigns. This is especially true given
that Mark Middleton was Epstein’s main White House contact, as Middleton was
one of the key players in the Chinagate affair that also involved controversial
fundraising tied to foreign intelligence. It is also important to keep in mind that,
by this point, Epstein had been involved in criminal financial activity with Towers

Financial and in helping to both find and hide “looted” funds for powerful people,
including Adnan Khashoggi.

It is also worth noting that, during this period of questionable fundraising in
which Epstein was involved, other dubious figures linked to organized crime also
sparked controversy for attending prominent Clinton and DNC fundraisers. For
instance, Richard Mays, an Arkansas lawyer and Clinton friend, secured the
attendance of twice-convicted felon Eric Wynn, who was linked to the Bonanno
crime family via court documents, at a DNC-arranged coffee with the President in
December 1995.4 Wynn had also attended several DNC fundraisers using
tickets purchased by Richard Tienken, who had close ties to the Lucchese crime
family. Wynn had also aided Tienken’s separate fundraising efforts for Clinton,
according to the Washington Post. Notably, Richard Mays also played a peripheral
role in the suspect activities of Charlie Trie during this period.

Another organized crime figure was nearly brought into the 1996 election
fundraising fold by DNC fundraiser and Zionist millionaire Sam Domb, a close
friend of Steven Spielberg and former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, among
others.*8° Domb was a major fundraiser during the 1996 campaign for Clinton, so
much so that he was prominently seated at the First Lady’s table at a DNC
managing trustees’ dinner in February 1995. Next to Domb at the table was
Charlie Trie. Notably, Domb can be found in Epstein’s book of contacts.

Domb came under media scrutiny in 1996 for having brought a man named
Grigori Loutchansky to a DNC dinner in 1993. At that fundraiser, Loutchansky
later “told reporters that the President asked him to convey a message to the
president of Ukraine, asking him to reduce the country’s nuclear stockpile,’ a
charge later denied by a senior administration official.

Domb attempted to bring Loutchansky to a 1995 DNC fundraiser at the Hay
Adams hotel, until the Clinton administration’s national security council
recommended Loutchansky not attend. Domb was asked to rescind the invitation
and reluctantly did so. It later emerged that the NSA had monitored conversations
between Domb and Loutchansky and those conversations revealed that Domb
was planning to donate $25,000 to the DNC so Loutchansky could attend a DNC
fundraiser. In 1996, TIME magazine reported that Loutchansky was “under
investigation by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the United States
and other countries” for suspected involvement “in arms-trafiicking, money

laundering, and other crimes.” Loutchansky’s US attorney at the time was Thomas
Spencer Jr., a close friend of Ted Shackley’s.2*4

It turns out that Loutchansky was most likely a part of the “global coalition of
criminals” organized by Robert Maxwell in the late 1980s when he went into
business with organized crime in Eastern Europe and Russia. Loutchansky, at the
time, was the president of a company called Nordex, a trading company based in
Austria that mainly did business in the former Soviet Union and was previously
discussed in chapter 9. Though he was born and raised in the Soviet Union, like
Semion Mogilevich, he was using an Israeli passport to do business in Europe and
the United States. Loutchansky was also “considered a significant player in
Russian mob activities,” according to a congressional report.228

Per that same report, and as previously noted in chapter 9, Loutchansky was
close to Marc Rich. The report noted that Rich “has ... been linked” to
Loutchansky and that “According to press accounts, Loutchansky worked with
Rich in the early 1990s selling Russian oil and aluminum from formerly state-run
enterprises”?32 In addition, “English investigators found that [Loutchansky’s
company] Nordex was co-founded by Rich when the Soviet empire collapsed. At
the time, it served to transfer the Communist Party's funds abroad, including
stolen assets”? It was also reported that Nordex was a key part of Rich’s network
after he helped found it: “the Volga Refinery, one of the largest in the Russian
petroleum network, was acquired by Rich through an underworld corporate
storefront called Nordex”?

Nordex was later described by Andrew Cockburn as an “ex-KGB front
company” that intelligence sources believed was “involved in arms, drugs, the
whole nine yards”? It was also involved in the trade of nuclear materials. Its ties
to both Soviet Union era intelligence and an Israeli intelligence asset like Marc
Rich make Nordex a prime example of the intermingling of those networks,
particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Another prime example of how
those networks intermingled was, of course, Robert Maxwell himself. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, the Maxwell child who had sought to be his “father
reincorporated,’ Kevin Maxwell, was intimately involved with Nordex as was his
brother Ian.

According to a Guardian report from 1996:

[Kevin and Ian Maxwell] are working in what is described as a freelance capacity for
Westbourne Communications, a central London consultancy run by Jean Baddeley - Robert

Maxwell's long-standing secretary — which has a number of projects in the former Soviet Union.
... At one time they were working with Nordex, a mysterious Vienna-based trading company,
many of whose employees are former Soviet intelligence officers. Their involvement with

Nordex was arranged through Westbourne.242

According to Tom Bower in his book Maxwell: The Final Verdict, Kevin
Maxwell used Westbourne to continue his father’s work in Russia and Bulgaria.2“+
Bower writes: “Kevin offered his expertise in finance and banking to Russians
looking for investment opportunities in the West. Simultaneously, he had
proffered his services to Western companies seeking contracts in the Soviet
bloc”? Those companies, per Bower, included Nordex and Salomon brothers.

Thus, it seems that many of the same tactics employed by those linked to the
Riady family and/or Chinese military intelligence in Chinagate were also utilized
by Jeffrey Epstein and those in his broader network.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

As from Epstein’s growing importance as a Clinton donor, it appears that
1995 was also the year that the relationship between the Clintons and
Epstein became more intimate in other ways.
In a letter dated April 27, 1995, Lynn Forester, now Lynn Forester de
Rothschild, wrote:

Dear Mr. President: it was a pleasure to see you recently at Senator Kennedy’s house. There was
too much to discuss and too little time. Using my fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey
Epstein and currency stabilization, I neglected to talk to you about a topic near and dear to my

heart. Namely, affirmative action and the future 248

Forester de Rothschild then states that she had been asked to prepare a memo
on behalf of George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton communications director
and currently a broadcast journalist with ABC News. Stephanopoulos attended a
dinner party hosted by Epstein at his now infamous Manhattan townhouse in
2010, years after Epstein’s first conviction.

While it is unknown exactly what Forester de Rothschild discussed with
Clinton regarding Epstein and currency stabilization, a potential lead may lie in
the links of both Forester de Rothschild and Epstein to Deutsche Bank. As noted
previously in chapter 12, Epstein boasted of “skill at playing the currency markets
‘with very large sums of money” and that “Epstein had several meetings with
Harold Levin, then head of Wexner Investments, in which he enunciated ideas
about currencies that Levin found incomprehensible.’ Epstein also often claimed
that he had made his fortune investing clients’ money, including Wexner'’s, into
currency markets.748

Epstein’s more recent activity in currency markets, in the years that followed
his first conviction, appears to have been achieved through his long-standing
relationship with Deutsche Bank. As the New York Times reported in 2019:

[Epstein] appears to have been doing business and trading currencies through Deutsche Bank
until just a few months ago, according to two people familiar with his business activities. But as
the possibility of federal charges loomed, the bank ended its client relationship with Mr. Epstein.

It is not clear what the value of those accounts was at the time they were closed.242

As previously mentioned, the son of Esther Salas, the judge set to oversee a
case against Deutsche Bank related to its role in enabling Epstein’s financial
activities, was murdered right before that court case was to begin. The alleged
assailant was Roy Den Hollander, formerly of Kroll Associates.

Forester de Rothschild, at the time of Epstein’s arrest and still today, has
served as an advisor to the Deutsche Bank Microfinance Consortium for several
years and is currently a board member of the Alfred Herrhausen Society of
International Dialogue of Deutsche Bank.*®2 Her close relationship with Epstein
may be part of the reason why Deutsche Bank kept Epstein as a client for so long,
despite years of warnings from bank employees regarding questionable activities
connected to Epstein’s accounts.

At the time the 1995 letter was written, Forester de Rothschild was a member
of Clinton's National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council and, during the
latter years of Clinton’s second term, she also served on the advisory board for
then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. Richardson would later become one of
the Clinton era officials closest to Jeffrey Epstein.

Forester de Rothschild had apparently known Epstein for at least a few years
before she wrote the 1995 letter. Epstein had apparently played a role in her
divorce from Andrew Stein, a major figure in New York Democratic politics, in
1993. Andrew’s brother, James Finkelstein, had married Cathy Frank, the
granddaughter of Lewis Rosenstiel, the mob-linked businessman whose role in
sexual blackmail operations were discussed in Chapter 2 and elsewhere.

Rosenstiel’s apparent protégé, Roy Cohn, was the lawyer for Cathy Frank and
James Finkelstein.” It was at their behest that Cohn attempted to trick a nearly
comatose Lewis Rosenstiel into naming Cohn, Frank, and Finkelstein the
executors and trustees of his estate, valued at $75 million (more than $407 million
in 2022 dollars). Stein later worked for Ron Perelman and Perelman had hired
Roy Cohn to represent him during his first divorce in the early 1980s.

According to a 2019 Vanity Fair article, Epstein claimed that Forester de
Rothschild had “needed his financial help” during her divorce and that he had
“graciously floated her,” a claim that a Forester de Rothschild spokesperson denied

at the time of the article’s publication.

A few years later, as a “gift” to Epstein,
Forester de Rothschild introduced him to Alan Dershowitz, who would allegedly
become entangled in his sex trafficking activities and later become one of Epstein’s

defense attorneys.

Forester de Rothschild also has ties to Ronald Lauder through her position on
the board of directors of Estee Lauder companies. Forester de Rothschild also
partnered with Matthew Bronfman, son of Mega Group billionaire Edgar
Bronfman, to create the investment advisory firm Bronfman E.L. Rothschild LP.

More relevant, however, is Forester de Rothschild’s decades-long relationship
with the Clintons. Forester de Rothschild is a long-time associate of the Clintons
and has been a major donor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1992. Their ties
were so close that Forester de Rothschild and her current husband, Evelyn de
Rothschild, spent the first night of her honeymoon at the Lincoln Bedroom in the
White House while Clinton was president. She and Rothschild had first been
introduced at a Bilderberg conference by former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, whose close relationship with Hillary Clinton is well documented.24
Kissinger’s role in the PROMIS scandal as an enabler of Robert Maxwell’s sale of
the bugged software to Sandia national laboratory was discussed in Chapter 9.

Furthermore, a leaked email between Forester de Rothschild and Hillary
Clinton saw Clinton request “penance” from Forester de Rothschild for asking
Tony Blair to accompany Clinton on official business while she was Secretary of
State, preventing Blair from making a planned social visit to Forester de
Rothschild’s home in Aspen, Colorado.2°= Humbly requesting forgiveness is not
something Hillary Clinton is known for, given that her former bodyguard once
said she could “make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi ”?56

Endnotes

G. Pascal Zachary, “Report on Robert Maxwell Blames Goldman Sachs, Accounting Firm,’
Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB985943439894847660.
Paul Farelly, “How the City Ignored Alarm Bells on Maxwell,” The Observer, April 1, 2001,
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/apr/01/theobserver.observerbusiness11.

Martin Armstrong, “Epstein His Connection to ‘The Club’ of Manipulators,’ Armstrong
Economics, August 13, 2019, https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-
news/rule-of-law/epstein-his-connection-to-the-club-of-manipulators/,

“Multi-million Dollar Country Club Complex Due North of Brownville,’” Brownsville Herald,
March 3, 1974.

Aiding Hernandez-Cartaya in his purchase of Jefferson S&L was E.S.M. Government
Securities, a Florida-based securities dealer. See James Ring Adams, The Big Fix: Inside the S &
L Scandal : How an Unholy Alliance of Politics and Money Destroyed America’s Banking System
(New York: Wiley, 1991), 150-51. One of E.S.M/s top clients was the Cincinnati businessman
Marvin Warner. Warner's son-in-law, Stephen Arky, served as E.S.M’s attorney. In 1985, E.S.M
was shut down by regulators, triggering a subsequent collapse of Warner’s Home State
Savings Bank. This, in turn, triggered a run on Ohio's banking system that was halted when
the state’s governor declared a bank holiday and organized a bail-out passage.

E.S.M employees have insisted that the meeting with Hernandez-Cartaya was by chance.
There are reasons to doubt this story: Warner was a close friend associate of Edward
DeBartolo, and had even purchased DeBartolo’s beleaguered Metropolitan Bank and Trust.
DeBartolo, as noted in chapter 13, had a history of business with Hernandez-Cartaya’s WFC
Corp.

Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (S.P.I. Books, Dec. 1992), 186.

Epstein’s role in the collapse of Bear Stearns was unfortunately not explored in this book
due to time and space limitations. However, some have written specifically about Epstein
and the collapse of Bear Stearns and their arguments are worthy of consideration. See Steve
Sailer, “Did Jeffrey Epstein Personally Set off the Financial Crash of 2008?,” The Unz Review,

financial-crash-of-2008/.

Jaquelyn M. Scharnick, “Mogul Donor Gives Harvard More Than Money,’ Harvard Crimson,
May 1, 2003, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/5/1/mogul-donor-gives-harvard-
more-than/.

Lisette Voytko, “Leon Black Reveals Other Jeffrey Epstein Finance Clients—Including A U.S.
Treasury Secretary,’ Forbes, October 29, 2020,

Emily Shugerman and Suzi Parker, “EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein Visited Clinton White House
Multiple Times in Early ‘90s,’ The Daily Beast, July 24, 2019,

in-early-90s. E

Daniel Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Visited Clinton White House 17 Times, Logs Reveal,’ Mail
Online, December 2, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235499/Epstein-

12
13

26

27

28

Clinton.html.

Shugerman and Parker, “EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein Visited Clinton White House.”

Leon Fooksman, “EMBEZZLER GETS HOUSE ARREST,’ Sun Sentinel, March 2, 2001,
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2001-03-03-0103021175-story.html.

Bob Norman, “Palm Beach Mayoral Candidate Has Corrupt Past In Bahamas,” New Times
Broward-Palm Beach, February 10, 2009, https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/palm-
beach-mayoral-candidate-has-corrupt-past-in-bahamas-6453841.

Lisa Miller, “Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish Philanthropy,’ Wall Street
Journal, May 4, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB894240270899870000.

On Glass, Cosmos, and the Empire State Building Corp, see Jonathan Marshall, Dark
Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy: From
Truman to Trump, Additional Endnotes (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021),
https://rowman.com/WebDocs/Dark Quadrant Extra Notes.pdf; on Crown and organized
crime, see Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press,
1996), 154-55; on Wien, Dalitz and the Desert Inn, see Marshall, Dark Quadrant, 166.
Information linking Kahn and Shenker is found in Shenker’s declassified FBI file. See “Morris
Shenker FBI Files,” https://archive.org/details/MorrisShenker/Morris%20Shenker%2001/. See
also Marshall, Dark Quadrant, Additional Endnotes.

“U.S. Wide Pin Group is Formed,’ Miami Herald, April 1, 1961.

This is discussed at length in Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the
Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas (Routledge, 1991); see also SEC Docket: A Weekly
Compilation of Releases from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Vol. 14, 1978, 974-
76.

Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 366.

Robert L. Jackson, “Alleged $100,000 Payment to Bahamian Leader Probed,’ Los Angeles
Times, May 28, 1976.

“1001 Club Membership List,’ 1978, accessed via https://isgp-studies.com/1001-club-
membership-list

“New Board Member,’ Palm Beach Daily News, November 11, 1990.

Bradley J Edwards, Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, ePub (Simon
and Schuster, 2020), 48.

Marlon Ettinger, “The Money - Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Day 7,” Footnotes Newsletter,

06.55.12.pdf.

Patricia Leigh Brown, “A Redecorated White House, the Way the Clintons Like It,’ New York
Times, November 24, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/24/us/a-redecorated-white-
house-the-way-the-clintons-like-it.html.

Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Death of Vincent W.
Foster, Jr., United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, Volume I, July
29, 1994, p. 211, 228,
https://archive.org/details/WhitewaterHearingsOnTheDeathOfVinceFoster/.

Allan J. Favish, “Explanation of The Haut Report,’ AllanFavish.com,

29

30
31
32

33
34

39

36

37
38
39
40

41

42
43

44
45
46
47
48

49

Reed Irvine, “AIM Report: Evidence Proving Foster Was Murdered,” Accuracy in Media, July 1,
2001, https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-evidence-proving-foster-was-murdered/.

Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Death of Vincent
W. Foster, Jr., 883.

Irvine, “AIM Report.’

Irvine, “AIM Report.’

On normal procedures where investigator from the scene is usually present and how the
autopsy was rescheduled see: Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban
Affairs on Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., 412; on observer to autopsy see: Hearings Before the
Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., 419.
Irvine, “AIM Report.’

Beyer told Park Police about X-rays then denied taking them. See: Hearings Before the
Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., 95; Irvine,
“AIM Report.’

Michael Isikoff, “Foster Tried to Hire Lawyer Before Suicide,’ Washington Post, accessed via
Deseret News, August 15, 1993, https://www.deseret.com/1993/8/15/19061099/foster-tried-
to-hire-lawyer-before-suicide.

Ann Devroy and Susan Schmidt, “The Mystery in Foster's Office,” Washington Post, December

infosters-office/7d2abb40-35c6-439e-a943-4ba6d001af7d/.

Isikoff, “Foster Tried to Hire Lawyer.’

Devroy and Schmidt, “The Mystery in Foster's Office.”

Devroy and Schmidt, “The Mystery in Foster's Office.”

“Memo Links First Lady To Handling Of Suicide Note,” CNN, August 27, 1996,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210509000103/https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/
news/9608/27/whitewater/index.shtml.

The hand-writing experts were former New York Police Department homicide expert
Vincent Scalice, Oxford University manuscript expert Reginald Alton and Boston private
investigator Ronald Rice. For more on their analysis and Davidson, see: “Foster Suicide Note
Called Forgery,’ Tampa Bay Times, October 26, 1995,

“Memo Links First Lady To Handling Of Suicide Note.”

Karen de Witt, “Redecorating Private Rooms in Political Limelight,’ New York Times, August

limelight.html.

Brown, “Redecorated.”

Brown, “Redecorated.”

Brown, “Redecorated.”

Shugerman and Parker, “EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein Visited Clinton White House.”

James Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 01, Media Bypass Magazine, August 1995,
https://archive.org/details/VinceFoster-NSA-Banking-Transactions-Spying.

Linda Grant, “A Story You Won't Read in Forbes,’ CNN Money, October 2, 1995,
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995/10/02/206527/index.htm

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74

Grant, “A Story”

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 19.

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 19.

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 19.

James Norman, “Ye Shall Know the Truth..and the Truth Shall Get You Fired,” Media Bypass,
October 1995, https://www.fbicover-

Norman, “Ye Shall Know.”

Nathan Isaac, “FOIA Request for Chalmer C. Hayes Files (Federal Bureau of Investigation),
MuckRock, August 2, 2021, https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-
10/foia-request-for-chalmer-c-hayes-files-federal-bureau-of-investigation-116707/.
Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 40.

Dov Ivry, “Kavanaugh Sabotaged Vince Foster Probe,’ Times of Israel, October 3, 2018,
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kavanaugh-sabotaged-vince-foster-probe/.

Ivry, “Kavanaugh Sabotaged.’

Scott Rosenberg, “Let’s Get This Straight,’ Salon, March 6, 1997,

7/03/06/straight/.
Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 36.

James R. Norman, The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century, 1st ed (Oregon:
Trine Day, 2008), 101.

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 03.

Norman, “Fostergate,’ Document 03.

John O'Conor, “Seeds of Commerce: A Report on How the US Department of Commerce
Helps Others Foster Economic Growth” US Department of Commerce, January 1997, 72,
https://books.google.cl/books?id=7R6rBSkL1_kC,

Jim Brown, “Protocol Converters Play Integral Role in AS/400 Net,’ Network World, May 21,
1990, 21, https://books.google.cl/books?id=j|hOoEAAAAMBASJ; “Banks Gain Interface,’
Computer World, January 17, 1983, 52, https://books.google.cl/books?id=XnG8BXjSkSMC.
John Chamberlin, “This Month’s Q&A: August 2021,” Arkansas Center for Data Science, August

“Export Controls on Mass Market Software” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Economic
Policy, Trade and Environment, Committee on Foreign Affairs (1993), 31,
https://books.google.cl/books?id=9p7jRTSF9aMC.

Chamberlin, “Q&A: August 2021.’

“Arkansas Systems Aids China's Central Bank,’ American Banker, August 29, 1994,
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/arkansas-systems-aids-chinas-central-bank.
“Arkansas Systems.’

Sara Fritz, “White House Curbs Access of Former Clinton Staffer,” Los Angeles Times,
November 16, 1996, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-11-16-mn-65315-
story.html.

Bates, “Epstein Visited Clinton White House 17 Times.”

Bates, “Epstein Visited Clinton White House 17 Times.”

75 Fritz, “White House Curbs Access.”

76 Alamo Girl, “Mark Middleton, The Clintonista Shielded by Pres. Bush's Executive Privilege
Claim," Free Republic, September 5, 2001, https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/517500/posts.

77 Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities in Connection With 1996 Federal Election
Campaign, Final Report of the Committee on Government Affairs, United States Senate,
Together with Additional and Minority Views, Vol. 1, March 10th 1988, p. 1212,
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=djl70g6qFboC.

78 Jeff Gerth, “Cuban Exile Banker Under Wide Inquiry,’ New York Times, December 15, 1977;
James Ring Adams, The Big Fix, 73-74.

79 Adams, The Big Fix, 75.

80 DanE. Moldea, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football, 1st ed
(New York: Morrow, 1989), 292-94, https://archive.org/details/interferencehowo00mold/.

81 Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 1, 1211.
82 Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 1, 1211.
83 Fritz, “White House Curbs Access.”

84 Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 1, 1210.

85 Laurence Zuckerman, “Rescue of BCCI Hong Kong Abandoned,’ New York Times, February 20,
1992; Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 1, 1122.

86 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties and Possible Violations of Law: Interim
Report, Sixth Report by the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Together
with Additional and Minority Views, Vol. 2, November 5th, 1988, 1190,
https://books.google.com/books?id=XT7_xMCH4KkC.

87 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1190.

88 John Greenwald, “John Huang: The Dems Cash Cow,’ TIME, November 11, 1996.

89 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1193.

90 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1191.

91 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1193.

92 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1193.

93 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1205.

94 Greenwald, “John Huang.”

95 Jeff Gerth, Stephen Labaton, and Tim Weiner, “Clinton and Friends: Strong Ties, Few
Questions,’ New York Times, February 14, 1997,
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/14/us/clinton-and-friends-strong-ties-few-
questions.html.

96 Greenwald, John Huang.’

97 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report-Final Report, Vol. 1, 1180.
98 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1195.

99 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1200-01.

100 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1195.

101 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1195.

102 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1195.

103 Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1196.

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On China Resources: George Driscoll and Susan S. Medgyesi-Mitschang, “Trading with the
People's Republic of China” (US Department of Commerce Office of International
Commercial Relations, 1971), 10, OBR-7 1-024, https://play.google.com/books/reader?
id=mGwMvGW2hBsC.

On the Lippo-China Resources-BCCIHK negotiations: Investigation on Illegal Or Improper
Activities in Connection With the 1996 Federal Election Campaign-Part 2, Hearings Committee
on Governmental Affairs United States Senate One Hundred Fifth Congress 1997, 29,
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=cviIbAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-
cvl6bAQAAMAAJ&r-dot=1.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1202.

Investigation on Illegal Or Improper Activities in Connection With the 1996 Federal Election
Campaign-Part 2, Hearings Committee, 29.

Retaliation at the Departments of Defense and Energy: Do Advocates of Tighter Security for U.S.
Technology Face Intimidation?, Hearing Before the Committee on Government Reform,
House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixth Congress, First Session, June 24, 1999, p. 210,
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=N87kpvbYyRIC.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1201.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1202.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1210.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1209.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1350.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1351.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1351.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities in Connection With 1996 Federal Election
Campaign, Final Report of the Committee on Government Affairs, United States Senate,
Together with Additional and Minority Views, Vol. 2, March 10th 1998, p. 2523, n. 42,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Investigation of Illegal Or Improper Act/YUBBoz
ZSzOkC.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1351-52.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2521.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1352.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1354.

Lena H. Sun and John Pomfret, “The Curious Cast of Asian Donors,’ Washington Post, January
27,1997,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081015235608/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/politics/special/campfin/stories/donors.htm.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1353.

Michael Daly, “Chinese Billionaire Arrested in U.N. Bribery Case Has Clinton Links,” The Daily
Beast, October 7, 2015, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/07/chinese-
billionaire-arrested-in-u-n-bribery-case-has-clinton-links,

Daly, “Chinese Billionaire Arrested.”

Zhidong Hao, Macau History and Society (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011),
180.

Hao, Macau History, 180.

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Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2522.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2525.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2526.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2526.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1364.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1370-72.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1373-74.

Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2528.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1361.

Sara Fritz and Rose Tempest, “Ex-Clinton Aide Arranged for Taiwan Connection,” Los Angeles
Times, October 30, 1996.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1364.

Michelle Toh et al., “Stanley Ho, Hong Kong Billionaire and Macao's ‘godfather of Gambling,
Dies at 98,” CNN Business, May 26, 2020,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/business/stanleyho-obit-intl-hnk/index.html.

Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports
of China (London Lloyd’s Greater Britain Pub. Co, 1908), 178,
https://archive.org/details/twentiethcenturyOOwriguoft.

Sean Nicholls, “Uncensored Documents Reveal Gambling Authority’s Concern about James
Packer's Links with Mogul Stanley Ho,’ Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 2014,
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/uncensored-documents-reveal-gambling-

11lqtr.html; AP, “Atlantic City Casino Mogul and Daughter Have Ties to Chinese Mob,
Authorities Say,’ NewJersey.com, March 17, 2010,

“Asian Casino Magnate Stanley Ho Denies Organized Crime Ties, Refuting NJ Casino
Regulators,’ Business GAEA Times, March 18, 2010,
https://business.gaeatimes.com/2010/03/18/asian-casino-magnate-stanley-ho-denies-

AP, “Atlantic City Casino Mogul.’

“Macao Factsheet,” Government Information Bureau of the Macao SAR,
https://www.gcs.gov.mo/files/spage/CFA7_E.html.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1374.
Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2535.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1388.
Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities-Final Report, Vol. 2, 2536.

“Macau Billionaire Sentenced To 48 Months In Prison For Role In Scheme To Bribe United
Nations Ambassadors To Build A Multibillion-Dollar Conference Center” (United States

billionaire-sentenced-48-months-prison-role-scheme-bribe-united-nations.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1674.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1675.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1676.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1676.

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Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1676-77.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1687.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1687.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1687-88.
Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1696.

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1727.

David Jackson and Lena H. Sun, “Liu’s Deals With Chung: An Intercontinental Puzzle,’

srv/politics/special/campfin/stories/liu052498.htm.

Jackson and Sun, “Lui’s Deals.”

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1714.

Jackson and Sun, “Lui’s Deals.”

Jackson and Sun, “Lui’s Deals.”

William C. Rempel and Alan C. Miller, “Chung Details Alleged Chinese Funding Scheme,’ Los
Angeles Times, May 7, 1999, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-may-07-mn-
34766-story.html.

Rempel and Miller, “Chung Details.’

Jill Abramson and Don Van Natta Jr., “Clinton-Loral: Anatomy of a Mutually Rewarding
Relationship,’ New York Times, May 24, 1998,

Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties: Interim Report, 1715.
Abramson and Van Natta, “Clinton-Loral.”
Abramson and Van Natta, “Clinton-Loral.”

Laura Myers, “Air Force Cites Pilot, Command Errors in Crash of Brown's Plane,’ Associated
Press, June 7, 1996.

Myers, “Air Force Cites Pilot.’
“Avionom Je, Ipak, Najsigurnije, Slobodna Dalmacija, August 30, 2008,

abid/94/article-Type/ArticleView/articleld/20301/Default.aspx.

“25 Years Later: Honoring the Memory of the Lives Lost on April 3, 1996,’ Tradeology: The
Official Blog of the ITA, April 2, 2021, https://blog.trade.gov/2021/04/02/25-years-later-
honoring-the-memory-of-the-lives-lost-on-april-3-1996/.

Christopher Ruddy, “Experts Differ on Ron Brown head wound,’ Pittsburgh Tribune Review,
December 3, 1997.

Ruddy, “Experts Differ.’

Ruddy, “Experts Differ.’

Wesley Phelan, “The Botched Ron Brown Investigation: An Interview with AFIP Forensic
Photographer Kathleen Janoski, The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol. 2, No. 35, October 26, 1998,
http://www.buchal.com/library/coverups/ronbrown.htm,

Phelan “The Botched Ron Brown Investigation.”

Robert E. Pierre and Martin Weil, “Employee's Body is Found in Commerce Dept. Office,’
Washington Post, November 30, 1996,

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commerce-dept-office/73570a2f-cd90-48bd-8424-fc54cfe81cbd/.

Pierre and Weil, “Employees Body is Found,’; Dana Hedgpeth, “Washington police rule out
foul play in death of Gambrills woman in office,” Baltimore Sun, November 30, 1996,
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1996-12-01-1996336009-story.html.

Pierre and Weil, “Employees Body is Found.”

“Judicial Watch petitions to continue Ron Brown investigation by Independent Counsel,’
Judicial Watch, February 12, 1998,

“Judicial Watch petitions.”

“Commerce chief's son scrutinized for ties,” Associated Press, October 6, 1995.

“Suit claims ex-islander ‘looted’ Oklahoma firm,’ Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 1, 1995.
“Prosecutor Investigating Commerce Chief Expands Inquiry to Son,’ New York Times,
February 7, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/07/us/prosecutor-investigating-
commerce-chief-expands-inquiry-to-son.html.

Toni Locy, “Brown Pleads Guilty to Election Violation,’ Washington Post, August 29, 1997,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/08/29/brown-pleads-guilty-to-
election-violation/e6b58691-5afe-424f-b082-cad3ea2fcc24/.

Locy, “Brown Pleads Guilty.”

Susan Schmidt and George Lardner, “Asian Pacific Group's 92 Role Still Sketchy,” Washington
Post, December 6, 1996,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/12/06/asian-pacific-groups-92-
role-still-sketchy/a2388d34-6385-4a06-a334-eeb846c95c40/.

Schmidt and Lardner, “Asian Pacific Group’s 92 Role.’

Bob Jones, “Lebanon's Chidiac’s Hawaii Ties,” Midweek, October 24, 2007,
http://archives.midweek.com/content/columns/justthoughts_article/lebanons chidiacs ha
waii_ties/.

Testimony of Former Employees of the Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro Hearing Before the
Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred
Third Congress, First Session, November 9, 1993, Volume 4, p. 30,
https://books.google.com/books/about/Testimony_ of Former Employees of the Ban.htm
I?id=INmza17bNioC; “Developer charges Isle ‘corruption, extortion,’ Honolulu Advertiser,
January 18, 1993.

David Leigh and Mark Hollingsworth, “I planned 250,000 dollar business gift for MP” The
Observer, May 21, 1987.

Byron York, “Michael Brown Goes Free,’ The American Spectator, Vol. 30, Issue 11, 1997, 25.
York, “Michael Brown Goes Free,’ 25.

“Suit claims ex-islander ‘looted’ Oklahoma firm”

John Solomon, “FBI Probed Fund-Raising in 1992,” Associated Press, May 22, 1998.
“Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges Tied to Clinton White House,” Oklahoma Constitution,
https://www.oklahomaconstitution.com/ns.php?nid=1 13.

“Pipeline nears completion,’ The American, September 29, 1990.

histories/arkla-inc-history/; “Witt Stephens (1907-1991),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas,

199 Confirmation Hearings for the Department of Justice Hearings Before the Committee on the
Judiciary on the Nominations of Philip Benjamin Heyman, United States Senate, One Hundred
Third Congress, First Session, May 18, 19, 20; June 9, 16, 22; September 30; and October 14,
1993, Volume 4, 156, https://archive.org/details/confirmationhearOQunit/.

200 “Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges.”

201 “Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges.”

202 Michael Barbaro, “As a Director, Clinton Moved Wal-Mart Board, but Only So Far,” New York
Times, May 20, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/politics/20walmart.html.

203 Hearings before the Special Committe to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and
Related Matters, United States Senate, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, 1997,
227,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Investigation of Whitewater Development/BpTCv
ux-p4NYC.

204 “Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges,’; Todd Gill, “Alice Walton to receive honorary degree
from the University of Arkansas,’ Fayetteville Flyer, February 16, 2012,

from-the-university-of-arkansas/.

205 Gene Lum, Nora Lum, and Ron Brown, “Interview With Michael McAdams,’ PBS Frontline,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/fixers/interviews/mcadams.html.

206 “Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges.”

207 “Informant’s Death Ruled as Natural,’ The Oklahoman, March 19, 1998,
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1998/03/19/informants-death-ruled-as-
natural/62288014007/.

208 “Oklahoma Natural Gas Overcharges.”

209 “Heifer Partners,’ Heifer International, https://archive.pbh/WFLQW.

210 “Board of Trustees,’ Heifer Foundation, https://myheiferfoundationgiving.org/about/board-
of-trustees/.

211 Ben Ashford, “Family of Clinton Advisor Block Release of Files Related to His Death,’ Mail
Online, June 6, 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10882101/Family-late-
Clinton-advisor-Mark-Middleton-block-release-files-relating-suicide.html.

212 Ashford, “Family of Clinton Advisor Block Release of Files.”

213 Max Brantley, “Judge Seals Photos of Mark Middleton Suicide,’ Arkansas Times, June 22,
2022, https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2022/06/22/judge-seals-photos-of-mark-
middleton-suicide.

214 Bates, “Epstein Visited Clinton White House 17 Times.’

215 Daniel Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him to the Clinton White House,’ Mail
Online, January 13, 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10394863/Jeffrey-
Epstein-brought-eight-women-Clinton-White-House.html.

216 Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women.’

217 HashtTigre, Twitter post, June 15, 2022,
https://twitter.com/hash_tigre/status/1537250800581283840.

218 Bates, Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women.’

219 Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women.’

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Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women.’
Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women.’
Michael Powell, “Perelman Power,’ Washington Post, February 6, 1998,

srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/perelman020698.htm.

Powell, “Perelman Power.’

Paula Dwyer, “Ron Perelman, Vernon Jordan, And Zippergate,’ Bloomberg, February 15,
and-zippergate.

Aamer Madhani, “2 Lawyers on Trump Defense Team Shared Epstein as a Client,’ AP News,
January 24, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/005baf1972164c49924f787c08f985ae.
Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,’ Vanity Fair, March 1, 2003,

R. W. Apple Jr, “The President Under Fire: The Power Broker; Jordan Trades Stories With
Clinton, and Offers Counsel,” New York Times, January 25, 1998,
trades-stories-with-clinton-offers.html.

“Photo: Jeffrey Epstein at Clinton Fundraising Dinner,’ The Palm Beach Post, March 31, 1995,
“Bob Kanuth and Lesley Visser to Lead Altitude International's Worldwide Revolution in
Fitness and Performance,’ Altitude International Inc, February 14, 2019,
https://www.globenews-wire.com/news-release/2019/02/14/1725638/0/en/Bob-Kanuth-
and-Lesley-Visser-to-Lead-Altitude-International-s-Worldwide-Revolution-in-Fitness-and-
Performance.html.

Paul Vitello, “Sylvia Hassenfeld, Philanthropist From Hasbro's Founding Family, Dies at 93,

Foundation to Channel $3-4 Million in Grants to Help Enhance and Improve Professional
Leaders,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 22, 1987, https://www.jta.org/archive/wexner-

leaders.

Kenneth Schultz, “PROFILE Bronfman Relishes Chance to Be Pioneer Chair of New
Partnership,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 16, 1999,

chair-of-new-partnership.

“Grant Directory,’ The Andrea & Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, http://www.acbp.net/grant-
directory _2.php.

Bob Woodward and Charles R. Babcock, “Stock Manipulator Attended Coffee With Clinton,’
Washington Post, February 1, 1997,

attended-coffee-with-clinton/56a1e238-c869-47c6-b0b8-50cdef31¢33b/.

Kelly Crow, “Hotel Developer Recasts Himself As an Angel for Old Synagogues,’ New York
Times, August 26, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/nyregion/neighborhood-

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Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities in Connection With 1996 Federal Election
Campaign, Final Report of the Committee on Government Affairs, United States Senate,
Together with Additional and Minority Views, Vol. 6, March 10th 1988, p. 8257,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Investigation of Illegal Or Improper _Act/qmHb7
ZqmWvYC.

For Spencer serving as Loutchansky’s attorney, See: Bob Woodward, “White House Gave
DNC Top-Secret Intelligence,’ Washington Post, April 8, 1997,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/04/08/white-house-gave-dnc-top-
secret-intelligence/3054512d-5a72-4a16-909e-81c84e1da623/; For Spencer as a close friend
of Shackley, See: “CIA Operative Theodore Shackley Dies,” The Edwardsville Intelligencer,
December 13, 2002, https://www.theintelligencer.com/news/article/CIA-Operative-
Theodore-Shackley-Dies-10483436.php.

“Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House,” Second Report, Volume 1,
US Congress House Committee on Government Reform, 2002, 112,
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/107th-congress/house-report/454.

“Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House,’ 112.

“Did Rich work with Russian mafia?,” SWI, June 2002,
https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/arbeitete-rich-mit-russen-mafia-/2764916.

Bruce Raphael, King Energy: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial Empire Gone Awry (CA, Writers
Club Press, 2000), 537-38, https://books.google.com/books?id=MsM7-2tO00Q4C.

Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, One Point Safe, 1st Anchor Books ed (New York:
Anchor Books, 1997), 106.

Lisa Buckingham “Maxwell's Star Shines in the East,’ The Guardian, September 20, 1996.

Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Final Verdict (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 371.

Bower, Maxwell, 371.

“Letter to President Clinton,’ The Daily Beast, April 27, 1995,

x_0,y_0/dpr_1.5/c_limit,w_ 792/fl_lossy,q_auto/190723-epstein-embed1_mfpeel.
NY Magazine Editors, “The High Society That Surrounded Jeffrey Epstein,” Intelligencer, July

contacts.html.

Taylor Nicole Rogers, “Jeffrey Epstein Made $200 Million in 5 Years after He Registered as a
Sex Offender. Here’s How the Mysterious Financier Made His Fortune,” Business Insider, July 8,

2019-7.
James B. Stewart et al., Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune May Be More Illusion Than Fact,” New York

networth.html.

“Lynn Forester De Rothschild,” The McCain Institute for International Leadership,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170803135655/https://www.mccaininstitute.org/staff/lynn-
forester-de-rothschild/.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls’: The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell,”

ghislaine-maxwell-epstein-enabler.

252

253
254

255

256

Laurie Johnston, “Usery Is Confirmed As Labor Secretary,” New York Times, February 5, 1976,

labor-secretary.html.
Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls’: The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell.”
Meghan Keneally, “Hillary and Henry: Clinton's Relationship With Kissinger,’ ABC News, May

kissinger/story?id=39195203.
Whitney Webb, “Hillary Clinton Begs Forgiveness From Rothschilds In Leaked Email,’

forgiveness-rothschild-leaked-email/221570/.
Wills Robinson, “Secret Service Agent Pens Tell-All Book about the Clinton White House,”
Mail Online, June 5, 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-362603 1/A-Secret-

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Doorway of 11 East 71st Street

Wikimedia/Jim Henderson

CHAPTER 17

EPSTEIN’S ENTERPRISE?

SPOOK AIR

he timing of Jeffrey Epstein’s 17 White House visits, as well as Bill Clinton's

suspiciously financed re-election campaign, largely coincided with at least
three separate ventures that, not only intimately involved Epstein and Leslie
Wexner’s The Limited, but also two different CIA-linked airlines: Arrow Air and
Southern Air Transport.

Beginning in March 1992, The Limited was linked in local press reports to
efforts by different airlines to install themselves at Rickenbacker, specifically at
Rickenbacker Air Industrial Park. The first of these involved the Russian state-
owned airline Aeroflot. A Columbus development group, named A.R. Corp (with
A.R. standing for Aeroflot/Rickenbacker) brought a seven-man delegation
representing Aeroflot to Columbus.+

The goal was to make Rickenbacker a main cargo hub for the airline and A.R.
Corp had obtained the rights to set up North American Aeroflot Corp, an
“independent U.S. cargo carrier.” Reports at the time noted that an air cargo hub
had originally been set up by none other than Flying Tiger Line — the airline
connected to Anna Chennault and Robert Keith Gray (discussed in Chapter 5) —
in the 1980s. By 1993, that hub had been leased to Federal Express, which had
acquired the remnants of Flying Tigers, but had fallen into disuse.”

During the delegation’s visit, they made just four stops: a tour of
Rickenbacker’s facilities, a reception hosted by the Columbus law firm Emens,
Hurd, Kegler & Ritter, a visit with Franklin County commissioners and then
Mayor Greg Lashutka, and - last but not least — “a tour of The Limited’s
distribution center with Lee Johnson, president of Limited Distribution”?

The deal was subsequently promoted as offering “a gateway to world markets
for Rickenbacker Air Industrial Park,” with Ralph Fresca - one of the three
partners in A.R. Corp. — telling the Columbus Dispatch that “Little Rickenbacker
would have access to ports that no other US airline can fly into” if the deal was
approved.*

At the time, Larry Garrison, then the executive director of the Rickenbacker
Port Authority, asserted that “international cooperative ventures such as North
American Aeroflot are the wave of the future.’ Garrison also urged for many

existing restrictions on Rickenbacker flights, such as having at least one American
having to present on the crew, be lifted.

A little less than a year later, in January 1993, efforts to cement the deal
continued. It was reported in the Columbus Dispatch on January 16 that a
delegation from central Ohio was due to visit Moscow in March “in connection
with a mid-April target to begin air cargo service from Columbus via Aeroflot
Russian Airlines” at Rickenbacker. Among the six person delegation, and the only
member of the delegation representing a private company was Lee Johnson,
president of The Limited Distribution Services who, incidentally, had also become
the chairman of the Inland Port Commission of Greater Columbus. A subsequent
report, from March 17, stated that the Ohio delegation that included Johnson did
indeed meet in Russia “with Aeroflot and government officials there [in Moscow]
to work out arrangements for chartering cargo flights to Rickenbacker.”

The January 1993 report also noted that unnamed “Columbus -area
entrepreneurs’ involved in getting the cargo service established were “talking to
three major prospective investors to provide $10 million to fund the venture,
including two Wall Street investment banks and one Ohio-based corporation”?

More importantly, the report added that “The fledgling cargo service [i.e.
North American Aeroflot] is still talking to several air carriers to tie into its
proposed worldwide service.” Per reports, “so far, the most firm is Arrow Air Inc.
of Miami, which would connect with Latin American cargo bound for Europe and
Russia.”2

This Columbus Dispatch report added more about Arrow Air’s planned role,
stating that:

Arrow has committed to an almost daily flight to Columbus from five or six Latin American
countries, Arrow Air President Dick Haberly said. It would bring pharmaceuticals, medical
equipment, electrical goods, fresh flowers, and seafood for destinations in the United States,
Europe, and Russia. Flights going back to Latin America would be loaded with electrical
equipment, computers and textiles, Haberly said.

Arrow now has one daily flight into Columbus from various points in Latin America, a DC-
8-63F capable of carrying 100,000 pounds of cargo. The capacity would be doubled by the new
commitment.

Arrow recently brought some of its key customers from Latin America to Columbus, in
order to tour Rickenbacker International Airport and to make them “comfortable” with the new

arrangement, Haberly said? 10

As the deal involving Aeroflot and Arrow Air continued to be cemented, it was
then reported in March 1993 that “Among the many international companies that
have central Ohio homes, The Limited played a key role in cultivating the Aeroflot
Enterprise.’

In apparent reference to the role Arrow Air stood to play, this report also
stated “The airline anticipates that its Rickenbacker flights also will link with cities
in South America and along the Pacific Rim. The Limited each year imports about
60 million pounds of merchandise from Pacific Rim nations” The first flight of
North American Aeroflot would take place shortly thereafter on April 26, 1993,
originating in far eastern Russia and stopping in Anchorage, Alaska before arriving
in Columbus. Its cargo, local media reported, “was bound for The Limited’

The involvement of Arrow Air in the Aeroflot charter flights, in which The
Limited had been intimately involved, is highly significant. In court documents
from 1991 and related to the arrest of Arif Durrani, federal prosecutors had
referred to Miami-based Arrow Air as “a Florida Corporation contracted by the
NSC[National Security Council]/CIA/SAT[Southern Air Transport] to move
weapons and equipment as part of the covert Iran-Contra weapons/hostage
operation”? Other documents referred to in that text are stated to “clearly show
the CIA/NSC Arrow Air links.’ Also referenced is the testimony of Southern Air
Transport’s Charles Mulligan confirming that SAT had contracted Arrow Air for
“extremely secret operations” +4

Also worth noting is the December 1985 crash involving an Arrow Air plane
that had been carrying 248 American soldiers. It was subsequently determined
that the plane had been involved in the “arms for hostages” aspect of Iran-Contra
and had been carrying contraband weapons at the time it crashed. Also found
among the plane’s wreckage was a “thirty-two-kilo army-issue duffel bag stuffed
with US currency.’

According to Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne in their book The Outlaw Bank,
the money - likely amounting to millions of dollars — had been “BCCI money.” A
BCClI-connected arms dealer interviewed by Beaty and Gwynne, referred to in the
text of their book as “Heinrich,” subsequently claimed that the money had indeed
belonged to BCCI, stating “This money on the plane was money that [BCCI
founder] Abedi, money that the [BCCI] bank, had provided US intelligence for
covert operations. The money was being used by the American military. I have no

idea what for”!®

Remarkably, less than a month after the Aeroflot/Arrow Air arrangement in
Rickenbacker had begun, Southern Air Transport itself would begin its efforts to
claim dominance over the Columbus area airstrip. This, of course, raises questions
as to why two airlines linked to Iran-Contra arms smuggling and covert
intelligence networks were so eager to insert themselves into cargo concerns that
intimately involved Leslie Wexner’s The Limited.

On Wednesday May 12, 1993, Columbus newspapers reported that “another
start-up air cargo service is poised to begin serving Rickenbacker International
Airport with weekly flights,” beginning that Sunday. This company was known as
Polar Air Cargo, based in Long Beach, California, and it planned specifically — in
its inaugural flight to Rickenbacker — “to land ... with clothing bound for The
Limited Inc. from Hong Kong.” The report also stated that “Polar hopes to make
The Limited a regular customer, but it will deal with freight forwarders, not with
the company? +

The article also notes that “Of Polar Air Cargo’s 17 employees, more than half
formerly worked for Flying Tigers, and the company one day hopes to use a
portion of the now mostly vacant Flying Tigers facility at Rickenbacker, said Ned
Wallace, chief executive officer”!® At the end of the article, it is revealed that Polar
Air Cargo is a company that “harnesses the resources of three partners - NedMark
Transportation Services, Long Beach Calif.; Southern Air Transport, Miami; and
Polaris Corp., San Francisco.’ At the time, Southern Air Transport was owned by
James Bastian, a former CIA lawyer, who had owned the airline since 1979 and
throughout its use by the CIA in Iran-Contra and related operations. As
previously mentioned in chapter 10, a few months after Polar Air made this
announcement, The Limited began hiring pilots from Executive Jet
Aviation/NetJets, the aviation company tied to the Penn Central bankruptcy that
was later “frequently used” by Larry King, the man at the center of the Franklin
Scandal.

By January 1994, Polar Air was still making regular trips to and from
Rickenbacker, about four per week, while Arrow Air was making about five.
Around this time, Arrow Air was reportedly in talks about “relocating its central
Ohio business to Rickenbacker,’ which didn’t end up panning out. However,
soon after, in early 1994, Polar Air dissolved its relationship with Southern Air
Transport and announced it was “seeking governmental authority” to expand its
Columbus operations. Yet, area retail giant The Limited, which had been a major

force behind the changes at Rickenbacker beginning in 1993, seemed uninterested
in this “new” Polar Air. Instead, The Limited, Ohio politicians, and Rickenbacker
officials, among others, would instead move to court Southern Air Transport
directly, despite the airline's history.

When Edmund James, president of James & Donohew Development
Services, told the Columbus Dispatch in March 1995 that SAT was relocating to
Columbus's Rickenbacker airfield, he stated that “Southern Air’s new presence at
Rickenbacker begins in April with two regularly scheduled 747 cargo flights a
week from Hong Kong,” citing SAT President William Langton.”

“By fall, that could increase to four a week. Negotiations are underway for
flights out of Rickenbacker to the Far East.... Much of the Hong Kong-to-
Rickenbacker cargo will be for The Limited,’ Wexner’s clothing company. “This is
a big story for central Ohio. It’s huge, actually,” Edmund James said at the time.”

The day following the press conference, Brian Clancy, working as a cargo
analyst with MergeGlobal Inc., told the Journal of Commerce that the reason for
SAT’s relocation to Ohio was largely the result of the lucrative Hong Kong-to-
Columbus route that SAT would run for Wexner’s company. Clancy specifically
stated that the fact that “[The] Limited Inc., the nation’s largest retailer, is based in
Columbus ... undoubtedly contributed in large part to Southern Air’s decision”?

According to documents obtained by journalist Bob Fitrakis from the
Rickenbacker Port Authority, Ohio’s government also tried to sweeten the deal to
bring SAT to Columbus in order to please powerful Ohio businessmen, namely
Wexner.? Orchestrated by Governor George Voinovich’s then-Chief of Staff Paul
Mifsud, the Rickenbacker Port Authority and the Ohio Department of
Development created a package of several financial incentives, funded by Ohio
taxpayers, to lure the airline to relocate to Ohio. The Journal of Commerce
described the “generous package of incentives from the state of Ohio” as
“including a 75 percent credit against its corporate tax liability for the next 10
years, a $5 million low-interest loan, and a $400,000 job-training grant”? In 1996,
then-SAT spokesman David Sweet had told Fitrakis that the CIA-linked airline
had only moved to Columbus because “the deal [put together by the development
department] was too good to turn down”? It was alleged that this package had
largely been the result of political pressure applied by The Limited and its
executives.

Reporting from Bob Fitrakis in particular noted that Jeffrey Epstein was one
of the figures involved with Wexner and The Limited that was involved in courting
SAT.” In addition, in 2001, Fitrakis had told the Evening Standard of the UK that
Epstein was “Wexner’s Mr. fix-it. He has the spook connections and pulls the
strings worldwide. He handles all the logistics and moves the portfolio around for
him.”22 If Epstein indeed handled “all the logistics” for Wexner, he was then most
certainly one of the key people involved in the effort to court SAT, as well as Polar
Air and Arrow Air.

The past role of SAT in Iran-Contra and its CIA ties did not go unnoticed by
local journalists or the public, prompting the SAT’s Langton to tell the Columbus
Dispatch that the airline was “no longer connected to the CIA”24 SAT owner
James Bastian also later claimed that he “took steps to remove the ties with the
CIA’ at the time, though little — if any - evidence of such “steps” having been
taken exists. Instead, it appears that his effort to remove ties was more an effort
to rebrand the airline during the 1990s, following the apparent involvement of the
airline in the Gulf War (discussed in chapter 10).33

Reasons to doubt Langton’s claim would soon emerge, thanks to reporting
from local journalist Bob Fitrakis. Fitrakis would note that, in addition to Leslie
Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein and other key figures at The Limited, the other main
figures who were key in securing SAT’s relocation to Ohio were Alan D. Fiers Jr.,
the former chief of the CIA Central American Task Force, and retired Air Force
Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for SAT’s covert action in Laos
between 1966 and 1968, while the company was still known as Air America.*+As
noted in chapter 7, Secord was also the air logistics coordinator in the illegal
Contra resupply network for Oliver North during Iran-Contra, while Fiers was
also one of the key individuals involved in Iran-Contra. The involvement of both
Secord and Fiers in SAT’s relocation to Columbus to run cargo for The Limited is
incredibly telling, given their history. At the very least, this strongly suggests that
SAT planned to utilize the Hong Kong to Columbus route for much more than
just textiles.

This concern was apparently shared by local Ohio officials at the time. In a
2019 interview with Bob Fitrakis I conducted while working for MintPress News,
Epstein’s and Wexner’s involvement with SAT’s relocation to Ohio had caused
suspicion among some prominent state and local officials, who suspected that the
two were working with intelligence.** Fitrakis specifically stated that then-Ohio

Inspector General David Strutz and then-Sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith
had personally told him that they believed that both Epstein and Wexner had ties
to the CIA. Past allegations of Epstein’s intelligence links prior to this period were
previously discussed in chapter 11.

Fitrakis also told me that Strutz had referred to SAT’s route between Hong
Kong and Columbus on behalf of Wexner’s company The Limited as “the Meyer
Lansky run,’ as he believed that Wexner’s association with SAT was related to
Wexner's ties to elements of organized crime, which were detailed in chapter 13.

In addition, Catherine Austin Fitts — the former investment banker and
government official who has extensively investigated the intersection of organized
crime, black markets, Wall Street, and the government in the U.S. economy — was
told by an ex-CIA employee that Wexner was one of five key managers of
organized crime cash flows in the United States. She revealed this in a 2019
interview I conducted with her for MintPress News.*© This allegation is worth
considering in the context of both SAT’s and Arrow Air’s historic ties to not only
the CIA, but banks utilized by the CIA for covert smuggling operations, like
BCCI.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lofty promises SAT had made as the deal was
being cemented rapidly dissolved. While SAT had promised Ohio’s government
that it would create 300 jobs in three years, it quickly laid off numerous workers
and failed to construct the maintenance facility it had promised, even though it
had already accepted $3.5 million in taxpayer funds for that and other projects. As
the company’s financial problems mounted, Ohios government declined to
recoup the millions in dollars it loaned the company, even after it was alleged that
$32 million discovered in the personal bank account of Mary Bastian, the wife of
SAT’s owner and former CIA lawyer James Bastian, were actually company
funds.*4 On October 1, 1998, SAT filed for bankruptcy. Incidentally, it was the
very same day that the CIA’s Inspector General had published a comprehensive
report on the airline’s illicit involvement in drug trafficking in connection with the
Agency.

After bankruptcy, Southern Air Transport would re-emerge a year later in
1999 as Southern Air. Thomas Gillies, who had been president of SAT when it
collapsed in 1998, would return as Southern Air’s president. In 2003, Southern
Air filed for bankruptcy. Prior to its bankruptcy, it had won and operated US
government contracts related to the Iraq War.?? Southern Air Transport was

largely reorganized by Southern Air thanks to James “Jim” Neff, who had
previously orchestrated “the massive international expansion of the world’s largest
all cargo airline, Flying Tigers,” the airline tied to Anna Chennault and Robert
Keith Gray that was also seemingly connected to the aforementioned Polar Air
Cargo.*2 Neff later went on to create Western Global airlines, where SAT and
Southern Air’s president Thomas Gillies served as executive vice president. In
2016, Western Global became a source of controversy after one of its unmarked
planes was found to contain a dead body and 67 tons of South African banknotes
in its cargo hold during an emergency landing.** Given the history of SAT
following its Ohio relocation and into the present, it seems unlikely that SAT was
unconnected to US intelligence at the time of its 1995 relocation and afterwards,
as had been claimed SAT executives.

As for Wexner, Epstein, and The Limited, it seems as though their attention
turned towards Lane Aviation Corp. following the implosion of SAT in 1998.
Originally founded in 1935, Lane had expanded into Rickenbacker first in June
1995, shortly after SAT’s relocation to the airport, and can be found in Epstein’s
black book of contacts. Lane would later handle some Columbus area visits of
celebrities in Epstein's and Maxwell’s inner circle, such as the Duchess of York
Sarah Ferguson, as well as aircraft for The Limited. By 2010, Lane was a critical
provider of “essential services that are largely invisible to the public but support
most of the flights into and out of the airport [Rickenbacker].”*°

In 2011, something rather curious happened at Rickenbacker. After heavy
lobbying from local businessmen, US customs officials began to clear private
planes at “the two private terminal operators at Port Columbus” instead of having
to go through customs checks at the main terminal. The main businessman
behind this lobbying effort, per media reports, was “Limited Brands chairman and
CEO Leslie H. Wexner.’ The two private terminal operators at Port Columbus at
the time were Lane Aviation and Landmark Aviation. After the news was
announced, flights for The Limited between Columbus and Hong Kong
doubled. A few years later, in 2014, Lane Aviation moved to add its own
customs office to Rickenbacker, which it would share with Landmark Aviation.*”

Here, it is important to add some context about Landmark Aviation.
Landmark's board of trustees has included such figures as former CIA director,
former Secretary of Defense, and former head of the intelligence/military
contractor MITRE James Schlesinger as well as former US Senator Bob Kerrey

and former Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim.® In 2012, it was purchased by
the Carlyle Group.* That same year, Free Press, where Bob Fitrakis served as
editor-in-chief, reported that Landmark Aviation had been involved in
extraordinary rendition flights on behalf of the CIA.

The Carlyle Group is a global investment firm with historic ties to intelligence
and the Bush family. In addition, after September 11, 2001, their ties to the bin
Laden family in the years prior to the 9/11 attacks came under scrutiny. Carlyle’s
executives have often had ties to intelligence, with one example being its chairman
emeritus, Frank Carlucci, who served as deputy director of the CIA and, later,
Reagan's Secretary of Defense.

Carlyle’s co-founder and current co-chairman is David Rubenstein.
Rubenstein served on the board of the influential Trilateral Commission at the
same time as Jeffrey Epstein, while his ex-wife Alice Rogoff (whom he divorced in
2017) had a very close relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell as well as Maxwell’s
now defunct “charity,” the TerraMar Project? In 2022, during the Ghislaine
Maxwell trial, a juror in the case, Scotty David, who works for the Carlyle Group,
subsequently took credit for the jury’s decision to find Ghislaine Maxwell guilty
and “inadvertently” revealed that he had incorrectly answered a pre-trial
questionnaire. This affair, referred to as “JurorGate” by some, almost resulted in a

mistrial.~4

RE-EXAMINING “CHINAGATE”

Ree to 1995 — the year of SAT’s relocation to Ohio and the year where
pstein made his last visit to the Clinton White House — is there any
possibility that the White House visits and Epstein’s involvement with the affairs
of SAT are linked? Given Clinton’s own history in Iran-Contra as it relates to
Southern Air Transport and Mena, Arkansas (See Chapter 8), it is not
unreasonable to posit a relationship between Epstein’s visits to the Clinton White
House and Epstein-connected efforts related to ClA-linked airlines, particularly
Southern Air Transport. This is especially true given Epstein’s own past
associations with arms trafficking and the broader Iran-Contra network.

Why, of all the possible airlines, were Arrow Air and Southern Air Transport —
airlines extensively involved in the covert smuggling of drugs and weapons —
specifically courted by Epstein, Wexner, and the Limited to take up activities at
the Rickenbacker Airstrip in Columbus? Is there a connection to Rickenbacker’s
longstanding ties to the Anna Chennault and Robert Keith Gray-connected
Flying Tigers, going back decades? Why did The Limited, a company whose
logistics networks had been tied to organized crime at least as early as 1985, seek
to team up with these specific airlines? What do we make of Epstein, who had
historic ties to arms smuggling, intelligence, and operations that ran parallel to
Iran-Contra, and his involvement with these affairs? And what of the involvement
of Iran-Contra figures Alan Fiers and Richard Secord in Southern Air Transport’s
relocation to Columbus?

There are a mass of questions that emerge when examining, not only the
activities surrounding Rickenbacker in the early to mid-1990s, but also in
examining that past connections of both that specific airstrip and the airlines
involved, as previously detailed in this book.

Yet, when looking at both this situation in tandem with the nature of Epstein’s
Clinton White House visits, Epstein’s own past and the controversial activities of
his main White House contact, Mark Middleton — there may be yet an answer to
many of these questions, one which may hint at a major scandal of the Clinton era
that has managed to remain hidden for decades.

In 1991, the Washington Post published an article entitled “China's Weapons
Mafia,’ written by William Triplett III, then a senior staff member of the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee.°= The article named many of the companies that
popped up in the course of the investigations around “Chinagate,’ including Great
Wall and Poly Technologies. Also mentioned is Norinco. As noted in chapter 11,
Douglas Leese, at the time he was “mentoring” Epstein, was involved with a joint
venture between his company Lorad and Norinco. In addition, Leese, along with
Epstein and Adnan Khashoggi, were allegedly involved with the sale of Norinco
weapons during the Iran-Iraq War.

The Post article continues, stating that “this network of front companies and
secretive international trading firms have one other thing in common: They are
run for profit by China's ruling clans, the dynastic families that were disgraced in
the Cultural Revolution but survived and thrive today.’ Almost all of these
companies, it notes, were set up “in the 1980s as export companies for the various
armament ministries and the Equipment (Armament) Department of the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army (PLA)? Other reports from the 1990s stated that three
specific companies — Norinco, Poly Technologies (also referred to in some reports
as the Poly Group), and China Jingan “have dominated global small-arms traffic”
since the 1980s.°°

Triplett cites a DIA report, which states:

The companies ... are established and chartered to conduct business in the international
market. Many have offices overseas. While they are profit-oriented and are the key means for
defense complex foreign-exchange earnings, they are also the primary conduits for the
acquisition of new and advanced technologies.

In other words, these companies not only seek to market their armaments, but
also play a significant role in technology transfer.

It goes on to note that, in the 1980s, “China emerged as a leading arms
supplier to the Third World, signing agreements between 1983 and 1990 worth
more than $16 billion.” During that time, the article points out, the biggest
markets for Chinese weapons were Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1981-
1988). Yet, since that war concluded, the article states that “China must look
elsewhere for major sales.”

The article also critically notes that, during these arms sales in the 1980s, “the
bank of choice” for Chinese arms dealers in this network was none other than
BCCI. It also states that “BCCI also operated in Beijing, the Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone outside Hong Kong, and in 27 branches of Hong Kong itself
through what BCCI called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International Hong

Kong (BCCIHK). Profits through this system were used by the Chinese elite who
were intimately tied to these companies to import luxury goods for themselves,
foreign travel, or stored abroad in ‘secret stashes.”

As previously mentioned in chapter 8 and the last chapter, the Riady family
and John Huang - central figures in the Chinagate campaign finance scandal and
later associates of Mark Middleton — had been the main forces behind the
ultimately unsuccessful rescue of BCCIHK in 1991. It was also noted that they
had attempted to bring in state-owned China Resources, an alleged front for
Chinese military intelligence, to that rescue. After BCCIHK did fail, China
Resources and the Riadys’ network increasingly intermingled from 1992 onwards.

On the BCCIHK collapse, Triplett writes that “It is unclear what effect the
BCCI scandal and the multiple investigations of the bank and its affiliates may
have on Beijing’s ability to smoothly arrange financing for insuring, storing, and
shipping weapons, or diverting money to bank accounts abroad.”

Triplett also quotes a Congressional Research Service report, which stated
that “it is not clear whether China will be able to sustain its level of arms sales in
the Near East region now that the Iran-Iraq war has ended and it is a party to
discussions aimed at regulating arms transfers to this region .... Given China's
need and desire to obtain hard currency, it seems prepared to pursue arms-sales
opportunities it deems appropriate whenever they present themselves.”

Last but not least, this article also indicates that, at the time, “control of
Chinese sales of weapons of mass destruction” was a hot topic in foreign policy
circles, so much so that “Secretary of State James A. Baker III reportedly may soon
go to Beijing to take up the issue.” As previously mentioned in chapter 12, Baker
had a mysterious relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and, before leaving office in
1992, had rented a Manhattan mansion then-owned by the State Department to
Epstein.

Thus, in 1991, we have a situation where Chinese arms giants, also major
figures in technology transfer, were at a crossroads. They needed new markets for
their weapons and, with the collapse of BCCIHK, they needed a new yet similar
web of financial institutions that would aid them in the laundering and
sequestering of their profits.

They found their new market, not in the Middle East, but in the United States.
As the LA Times later reported: “When [the Iran-Iraq] war subsided, the three
companies [Norinco, Poly Group, and China Jingan] moved into the market
created by the ballistic mayhem of American streets, selling primarily

semiautomatic versions of the AK-47 and low-cost handguns modeled on more
famous brands. Norinco joined Colt and Smith & Wesson on police logs across
the country.’*2 Poly Group created a US subsidiary, PTK Holdings, which claimed
to have sold around $200 million in weapons in the US between 1987 and 1992.98

However, like the “boom years” of the Iran-Iraq war, the companies’ “boom
years’ in the US didn't last. In 1993, Clinton issued an executive order that linked
the annual review of China’s most favored nation (MEN) trading status to “overall
significant progress” in human rights. A year later, in May 1994, as the activities of
Huang, Trie, and others picked up steam in the Clinton White House, Clinton
reversed course and “de-linked” China's MFN status from any human rights
concerns.° As noted in the previous chapter, much of the early lobbying around
what later became Chinagate had revolved around the Clinton Commerce
Department, export-import and trade policy as well as Chinas MFN status.
Particularly interested in the MFN issue was James Riady, who broached the issue
during at least one of his meetings with Clinton. It is highly likely that the
activities of the Riadys, Huang, and others during this period (particularly their
sizable donations) had contributed to Clinton’s policy reversal.

However, to appease some in his party, including George Mitchell and Nancy
Pelosi, Clinton announced that he would ban the import of Chinese munitions,
which Clinton described as a “discrete” sign of US discontent with certain
Chinese government policies.©° The ban “deeply wounded one of the main profit
sources of the three primary Chinese companies” involved in selling arms to the
US, namely Norinco and the Poly Group.*4 Gun sales to the US, per the LA Times,
had been “one of Norinco’s most profitable businesses.” In the case of Poly Group,
the US ban “cut off an important source of revenue for the Chinese military,”
which owns Poly Group. Despite the blow to major state-owned weapons
manufacturers, “the Chinese government only mildly protested the weapons
sanctions”?

This lack of protest may have been because, soon after the ban was announced,
plans were apparently being made to smuggle weapons into the US. As the LA
Times reported, citing sources that worked in China’s arm trade, “it was the sudden
elimination of the United States as the biggest market for Chinese small arms in
1994 that created an atmosphere in which smuggling weapons into the US
became a dangerous possibility.”® In the case of the Poly Group, it later emerged

that “Poly executives quickly began seeking to smuggle Chinese-made guns” after
the ban was made public in 1994.4

In the previous chapter, it was mentioned that among the controversial
activities of Charlie Trie, arguably the most controversial was his role in bringing
China's “premier arms dealer” Wang Jun to a presidential coffee. Wang Jun, at the
time was chairman of the Poly Group, described as the “chief weapons trading
arm” of the PLA.® The company’s president was He Ping, the son-in-law of Deng
Xiaoping, China's leader from 1978 to 1992. Poly’s vice president was also the
daughter of former Chinese leader Yang Shangkun. Wang Jun had similar family
ties — his father was Wang Zhen, formerly a vice president of China who served in
prominent posts during Deng Xiaoping’s government and who was also a close
friend of the Deng family.

At the presidential coffee, Wang Jun met and was photographed with
President Clinton. Later, both Clinton and White House officials would say they
knew nothing about Wang, with Clinton adding that his presence at the coffee was
“clearly inappropriate.”

While other White House officials may not have known who Wang Jun was,
Mark Middleton certainly did and long before the February 1996 event where Jun
would meet the president. In early May 1994, at a private White House luncheon,
an American employee of Wang Jun named Claude Collins was asked to speak to a
“small gathering of business leaders” after he had escorted Deng Xiaoping’s son,
Deng Zhifang, “to some of America’s premier corporate centers.” After the lunch,
Middleton called Collins “for more details about Wang.” “He grilled me and
grilled me ... It’s hard to believe that they didn’t know who he was,” Collins later
told journalist Rebecca Carr.© It is also worth noting that during this time frame,
Middleton was already deeply involved with the main conspirators in the
“Chinagate” scandal as well as another intelligence-linked individual closely tied
to Chinese arms sales — Jeffrey Epstein.

Also, in October 1995, Wang Jun met Commerce Secretary Ron Brown at the
Shangri-La hotel in Hong Kong, a controversial dinner that had been orchestrated
by Charlie Trie, Ng Lap Seng, Antonio Pan, and Ernie Green. All four had close
ties to the Riadys and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Trie relied on
Middleton and Green as his main confidants during this period. It is also worth
mentioning that a business partner of Wang Jun, Huang Jichum, was a member of
Johnny Chung’s “China delegation” that visited the White House in 1995.67

Thus, Wang Jun had met other figures with prominent positions in the US
government and/or DNC aside from Middleton before the February 1996 coffee.
As a result, it is hard to believe that Middleton was alone in knowing who Wang
Jun was at the time of the coffee.

Indeed, as the Chicago Tribune noted, Wang “is well-known in international
arms circles and reportedly enjoys close personal and political ties to several chiefs
of state” and is “regarded as one of the world’s more powerful private citizens.” It
seems odd that, given this, he was completely unknown to White House officials.
The DNC, in allowing Trie to bring Wang to the coffee, had asked the White
House to clear entry for Trie and Wang; yet, for some reason, no such check was
done. Had Middleton been involved in scuttling these checks?

Though possible, Congressional reports indicate that Ernie Green — a Lehman
Brothers banker, DNC managing trustee, and Charlie Trie’s other confidant — had
been intimately involved in securing Wang's attendance.©2 Part of Green’s role
involved his $50,000 donation to the DNC on the same day as the coffee. While
Green claimed the donation came purely from him and his wife, David Mercer of
the DNC said he received Green’s check, not from Green but from Charlie Trie,
and testified that he understood the donation as being connected to the coffee.
Beginning in December 1995 and through the end of February 1996, Green
engaged in suspect banking activity, including “depositing large amounts of cash.”
He later “could not account for any of these transactions” when questioned by
congressional investigators. Thus, Wang Jun’s White House visit and meeting
with the president intimately involved the nexus responsible for the campaign
finance scandal. That nexus, as detailed in the last chapter, was deeply tied to
individuals enmeshed with the Chinese government as well as the Riady family.

Returning to Wang Jun, while the February 6, 1996 coffee was his most
controversial meeting, it was not his only important meeting during this particular
trip to the US. Wang had actually entered the US on February 1 and his
whereabouts between the 1% and the 5 are unknown. On February 5, Trie
hosted a party for Wang at his Watergate apartment that he shared with Ng Lap
Seng and used as an office/event center.” Little is known about the party, but at
least one important player in the Clinton administration who was associated with
Trie, Jude Kearney of the Commerce Department, was scheduled to attend. The
next day, not only did Wang attend the coffee, he also met with Commerce
Secretary Ron Brown. After meeting Brown he met with Ernie Green, Ng Lap

Seng, and Trie. Only after that did Wang attend the White House coffee. After the
coffee, Green took Wang to New York, ostensibly for a meeting between Wang
and Lehman Brothers.

There is much to the timing of Wang Jun’s White House visit. Wang’s visit
coincided with a major ATF/US Customs investigation into arms smuggling by
Wang's Poly Group as well as Norinco, the Chinese state-owned weapons
company that, since 1983, had a joint venture with Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor and
associate Douglas Leese. As congressional investigators later noted “Shortly after
Wang's Washington tour and appearance at the White House, word of the Federal
investigation into Poly Technologies was leaked to the press”? It continues,
stating that “this leak brought an early end to the sting operation run by the
Customs Service [known as Operation Dragon Fire]. At the time of the leak,
Customs officials were on the verge of arresting high-ranking Chinese officials for
arms smuggling. After the leak, which came from ‘diplomatic sources, the
Customs officials were left only with low-level criminals to arrest.”

One of the “high-ranking” officials who escaped to China after being tipped
off by “diplomatic sources” in the Clinton administration was Robert Ma, who
“ran most of Wang's operations in Atlanta,” including Poly Group's US subsidiary
PTK Holdings.“ Ma had left the US for China just two days before his arrest
warrant was executed. In addition, Vanity Fair later reported that Poly Group,
even prior to the initiation of Operation Dragon Fire, was already under
investigation due to “allegations that the Polytech subsidiary [PTK Holdings] was
attempting to covertly acquire advanced US weapons and radar technology.”®
Despite the leak and the escape of the top co-conspirators, the sting operation —
which took place in San Francisco - was still “the largest seizure of fully
operational automatic weapons in the history of US law enforcement.’

The source of the leaks that derailed Operation Dragon Fire was never
revealed. It is also important to point out that those leaks not only prevented the
arrest of the main conspirators, but also came just before Congress was due to
vote on China’s MFN status that year. If the leaks hadn’t happened and Operation
Dragon Fire had been allowed to continue and arrest its top targets, press reports
and statements from Congressmen at the time make it clear that the country’s
MEN status would have been revoked.

It turns out that the ships used to smuggle the weapons seized via Operation
Dragon Fire were owned by China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), the

“merchant marine arm” of the PLA. A partner of COSCO at the time was
Hutchinson-Whampoa, whose main shareholder was Li Ka-Shing. Li was another
figure related to Charlie Trie and who attended the October 1995 Shangri-La
meeting with Trie, Ng Lap Seng, Ernie Green, and Wang Jun. Li was also a
principal of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC),
a state-owned conglomerate which Wang Jun also ran. In addition, Li was also a
partner in the Riady-owned Hong Kong Chinese bank alongside the chairman of
China Resources.“ COSCO was subsequently a source of controversy in the late
1990s over allegations it was involved in smuggling and due to concerns that plans
to lease land to the company on or near US ports may have “security
implications.”&2

In addition to the smuggling activities, Wang Jun’s Poly Group was intimately
involved with technology transfer. After his company’s US branches came under
scrutiny in connection with weapons smuggling, documents and records kept by
Poly’s Atlanta subsidiary, PTK Holdings, indicated that “the company may have
intended to serve as a conduit through which the Chinese military could covertly
acquire advanced US weapons technology and products.”®+

The Chicago Tribune reported that company records showed that “starting in
the late 1980s, top Poly executives in China and Atlanta discussed plans to
disguise shipments of militarily sensitive technology to China.” It was also
revealed that Poly Group “executives transferred funds between offshore accounts
and shell corporations in an apparent attempt to conceal their assets and
activities”?

In 1988, a year after PTK was founded in the US, company memos revealed
plans to ship at least $19 million “worth of militarily sensitive US-made radar
equipment, then use a state-controlled shipping line to send the products to a
harbor” close to Beijing. That same year, “an officer in Poly’s purchasing branch
in Beijing wrote to a PTK executive instructing him to repackage a shipment of
computer equipment in brown paper and unmarked wood crates” in another
apparent effort of illicit technology transfer.

In this context, it is also worth returning to re-examine Loral and its CEO
Bernard Schwartz. As mentioned in the last chapter, Schwartz, between 1992 and
1996 was among the top (legal) contributors to the DNC, and some of his
donations controversially seemed to result in privileged access to Commerce
Secretary Ron Brown and a spot on Brown’s plane during a trade mission to

China. It was also noted in the previous chapter that Schwartz's company Loral
was under investigation for passing sensitive technology to China, specifically a
subsidiary of Chinese Aerospace Corporation, China Great Wall Industries.

In 1998, Schwartz revealed in an interview with the New York Times that, on
the plane with Brown to China, he asked Brown to “arrange a private meeting with
Zhu Gao Feng, the vice minister of Chinas Ministry of Post and
Telecommunications. In a meeting with Chinese telecommunications officials,
Brown publicly praised Loral’s Globalstar cellular telephone system.” The Times
then states that “Brown did arrange the meeting for Schwartz and another
executive at the Chinese telecommunications ministry. ‘I thought it was terrific — a
real opportunity, what a shot, Schwartz recalled. ‘It was a big deal. In a place like
China, it was important because the next time I went, I was able to say I had met
with the minister:”®=

It appears that Schwartz also met with another Chinese businessman involved
with the telecommunications industry during that visit - Li Kashing. During a
Senate committee hearing in 1999, it was revealed that “Li [was] so close to the
Chinese government that the Clinton White House included his bio along with
Chinese president Jiang Zemin to the CEO of Loral Aerospace, Bernard Schwartz,
just prior to the 1994 Ron Brown trade trip to Beijing. According to documents
provided by the Commerce Department, Brown and Schwartz were to meet both
Li and Gen. Shen Rougjun of COSTIND.” COSTIND is China's Commission for
Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, the government ministry
that sets policy for arms and defense procurement and has been compared to the
Pentagon’s DARPA.*°

As recently mentioned, Li Ka-shing was a business partner of the Riadys,
China Resources chairman Shen Jueren, and Wang Jun. In addition, Li Ka-shing
had attended one of the controversial Chinagate fundraisers with many of these
same characters and a shipping company linked to his business empire was
directly involved in the smuggling operations targeted by Operation Dragon Fire.

Soon, Schwartz began to heavily lobby the Clinton administration to transfer
the approval of satellite exports from the State Department to Ron Brown’s
Commerce Department. Joining Schwartz in these efforts were the chairmen of
Hughes Electronics and Lockheed Martin. A letter co-signed by the three
executives stated: “By making possible real ‘one stop shopping’ for all export
authorizations related to commercial communications satellite systems, your

decision will greatly enhance the ability of U.S. manufacturers to retain our global
competitiveness” 8

The relationship with Loral and Lockheed was particularly close, as Loral sold
off its defense division to Lockheed Martin in 1996.88 The decision to sell was
made by Schwartz during a private dinner with Lockheeďs CEO Norm
Augustine“? Loral subsequently moved to “focus exclusively on the satellite
industry as Loral Space & Communications.’ Schwartz later said that his close
relationship and fondness of Norm Augustine was “key to the transaction” and
that “without Augustine’s presence, [... ] there would have been no deal.”2° Just a
few years later, Augustine would create In-Q-tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, at
the behest of the US intelligence community.

The same year Loral merged with Lockheed, Loral came under investigation
for its alleged role in illicit technology transfers to entities associated with the
Chinese military, specifically a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Corporation,
Great Wall. As noted in the last chapter, the well-connected daughter of China's
top general was running another China Aerospace subsidiary and had been
involved with Johnny Chung’s illegal fundraising activities and influence
operations.

Notably, Hughes Electronics, which lobbied alongside Loral and Lockheed to
change satellite export approval policy, also came under investigation with Loral
for technology transfers to the same company. Hughes also made campaign
contributions for the 1996 election, though the New York Times described its
donations as “modest and bipartisan” in comparison to Schwartz’s donations.

Once under investigation, Schwartz retained two notable individuals to
defend Loral — Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Shortly before being retained by
Schwartz and Loral, both Perle and Feith had written the policy document “A
Clean Break”? As noted in chapter 14, A Clean Break was written for Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was described in the press as “a
blueprint for a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy
armies for regime changes, destabilization, and containment. Indeed, it even goes
so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with
missile-defense advocacy.’ Also noted in that chapter was Perle’s longstanding
proximity to Israeli arms dealers and Israeli espionage efforts targeting the United
States.

At the time he was retained by Schwartz, Perle was on the board of Hollinger
International and ran its subsidiary Hollinger Digital. Alongside him on the board
at the time was Leslie Wexner, among others. Perle’s involvement with Schwartz
and Loral also overlapped with his time on the Defense Policy Board, where he
worked closely with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the case of
Feith, his time working on the Loral matter overlapped with his stint as Under
Secretary of Defense for policy under Rumsfeld.

For Perle, he was also involved in another concern at the time he worked on
behalf of Schwartz and Loral. Per the New York Times, Perle had also been
“retained by Global Crossing, the communications giant, to overcome Defense
Department opposition to its proposal to be sold to a venture led by Hutchison
Whampoa, the conglomerate controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.”2>

Before Clinton left office, he granted Schwartz what he and Loral had sought
and gave satellite export approval to the Commerce Department. Clinton's
decision to do so “overruled a recommendation by Secretary of State Warren
Christopher and caused friction inside the Cabinet over concerns that American
security could be compromised%

The Clinton White House continued to give Schwartz what he wanted, even
signing waivers that authorized Loral to continue selling satellites to the same
Chinese network of companies despite being under federal investigation at the
time for those exact same activities. The president had been told that, in signing
these waivers, he was “letting Loral ‘off the hook on criminal charges for its

unauthorized assistance to China’s ballistic missile program:””4

THE ENTERPRISE STRIKES BACK

W: now return to a point where one question in particular stands out: Is

there significance to the fact that Mark Middleton, involved with Chinese
military espionage operations engaged in arms smuggling and technology transfer,
was also meeting with Jeffrey Epstein, a figure tied to US and Israeli intelligence
networks with a history in arms smuggling, during the exact same period? Given
the frequency of Middleton’s meetings with Charlie Trie, Johnny Huang, and
Epstein it seems that Middleton was meeting at least a few times a month with
some of these espionage-linked figures. What of Epstein’s relationship with
Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father had also previously played a major role, on
Israel's behalf, in arms smuggling and technology transfers?

On top of that, it is also critical to consider what was detailed in the first part
of this chapter — that Epstein, during this very period, had played a key role in
courting first Arrow Air and then Southern Air Transport —- two CIA-linked
airlines with histories of arms and/or drug smuggling — to relocate to Columbus,
Ohio, for the express purpose of servicing Leslie Wexner’s the Limited. At the
time, Epstein had such a far-reaching power of attorney with Wexner, he could
have utilized the Limited’s flights (and general relationship) with Southern Air
Transport in any way he saw fit. Is there a possibility that Epstein’s meetings at the
White House with Mark Middleton were also connected to his efforts related to
Southern Air Transport?

If so, this could this be the reason why Clinton's successor, George W. Bush,
used his first invocation of “executive privilege” while in office to shield any
information on the investigation into Middleton in the 1990s from being made
public. The Associated Press reported on September 6, 2001 that Bush was
“prepared” to engage in his “first known use of executive privilege” to subpoena
memos “about three Clinton-era cases”? One of these cases, the article reveals,
was that involving Mark Middleton. The Bush administration subsequently
invoked concerns that documents related to the investigation into Middleton
would violate the “national interest” if released to Congress.22 The Bush
administration's decision to block these records, but not, for instance, transcripts
between Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak related to the pardon of Marc Rich, reveals

the significance of Middleton's activities before and after his 1995 resignation
from the White House.

If Epstein’ meetings with Middleton were connected to Southern Air
Transport’s activities during this same period, what would that mean? The
Chinese network in which Middleton was enmeshed at the time was known to be
engaged in smuggling weapons into the US. They simultaneously seem to have
been paying off the DNC and the Clintons, a political dynasty notorious for “pay-
to-play” politics. In addition, one of these companies smuggling weapons as part
of this network — Norinco — had past ties to Epstein and Douglas Leese. Were
Middleton’s meetings with Epstein related to efforts to smuggle Norinco and Poly
weapons into the United States in a way that would forever elude future sting
operations like the thwarted Operation Dragon Fire? If so, would technology
transfer to China have also been involved?

These possibilities seem increasingly likely when considering Epstein’s
affiliation with Israeli and US intelligence at this time as well as the close-knit
network that had surrounded Robert Maxwell prior to his death.

In chapter 7, it was noted that an odd plan developed by GeoMiliTech
(GMT), a company tied to veterans of US and Israeli intelligence and to the arms
dealing network involving Robert Maxwell and Nicholas Davies, was brought up
at a CIA meeting with Bill Casey. That plan had involved “a complicated three-way
trading scheme, developed by GMT as a means of sustaining finances and
equipment for covert operations.’

The details of the plan were “a circular arrangement in which a trading
company would be established to supply freedom fighter movements which
Congress was unwilling to support for one reason or another. ... Israel would sell
certain things, military equipment, to the People’s Republic of China, who would
supply Soviet arms, which would then be brokered. ... Israel would be benefited
by the United States through a high technology support or other
compensation” 12

The following was also stated in chapter 7:

A schematic outline of this trading arrangement that was entered into evidence shows the

destination for the arms sourced from China224 They would go to US-backed rebels in

Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. GMT, in other words, was proposing the
creation of a multi-national economic arrangement that would bind together the US, Israel, and
China through a series of credit extensions, technology transfers, and arms deals.

It is quite possible that this was the ultimate plan for what the Enterprise was intended to
become though the official narrative holds that this arrangement was never completed. It seems
clear that certain elements of the plan did go into motion. Israel and China intensified economic
and political relations in the 1980s and both actively collaborated with the US in covert
operations.

Here, we have individuals tied to the networks explored in depth in this book
discussing plans to bring the US, Israel, and China together through arms deals
and technology transfers. In this chapter and the previous one, we have already
seen an apparent effort by the Clinton network, also previously involved in Iran-
Contra and with BCCI, to sign off on and then shield illegal technology transfers
between the US and China and then sabotage efforts to hold to account Chinese
state-owned companies engaged in arms smuggling into the US.

Much of this book, particularly Chapters 9 and 14, has dealt with the lesser
known aspects of the “special relationship” between the US and Israel that resulted
in the plunder of US military technology by Israeli espionage efforts. And, of
course, as part of the better known aspects of that special relationship, the US
government sells a massive amount of arms and sensitive military technology to
Israel every year. But, what of Israel and China?

In 1993, a year when the Riady family - the key power nexus behind
“Chinagate” — began to take on China Resources as a major business partner,
then-CIA director James Woolsey told Congress that Israel had been selling
“advanced military technology to China for more than a decade and is moving to
expand its cooperation with Beijing”! The CIA also asserted that Israel’s sale of
military technology to China “may be several billion dollars.” The agency also said
that “Beijing probably hopes to tap Israeli expertise for cooperative development
of military technologies, such as advanced tank power plants and airborne radar
systems, that the Chinese would have difficulty producing on their own.”
According to a New York Times report on Woolsey’s statements, “The agency’s
assessment is likely to provoke calls by members of Congress for greater scrutiny
of the sale of American military technology to Israel.”424 However, thanks to the
“special relationship” between the US and Israel, this did not come to pass. The
Times noted too that, also in 1993, the General Accounting Office “asserted that
the United States had not adequately supervised the sale of American technology
to Israel” for at least one sensitive military program.

A year prior in 1992, it had been disclosed in a Pentagon-funded report
produced by RAND Corporation that Israel was, at that time, “China's primary

supplier of weapons-related technology.” Also, in 1992, it was reported that the
Bush administration was “concerned that Israel may have shared American-made
Patriot missile technology with China, in violation of United States-Israeli
agreements banning diversion of such technology to a third country”1“ These
allegations were ultimately investigated by the State Department, then headed by
James Baker, which found no evidence for the allegations. As previously
mentioned in chapter 12, Baker had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein at the time
and rented a State Department property in Manhattan to Epstein that year for
reasons that still remain unclear.

With the issue coming up at congressional hearings in 1993, and again
throughout the Chinagate and related scandals of the mid-1990s, it seems that,
contrary to the claims made by Baker's State Department, Israel and China had a
deep technology transfer and military relationship. It is also worth reconsidering
the matter of Fostergate, discussed in the last chapter, and how allegations were
made that Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton gave extremely sensitive military and
intelligence secrets to Israel, and that Israel was subsequently alleged to have
passed them onto China.

It is also important to discuss the key figures behind the Israel-China
technology transfer/military relationship and how it began. Israeli defense
officials set foot in China for the first time in February 1979, when a plane
carrying the CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries and senior representatives of
Israels Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry touched down in Guangzhou.
According to historians Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot in their book The Weapon
Wizards, Israel was “about to lose one of its primary arms customers” — Iran, due
to the 1979 revolution. Top Israeli officials felt that “China could fill that
vacuum.”125

Katz and Bohbot go on to state that “the man who opened the door to China
for Israel was Saul [ie. Shaul] Eisenberg,’ who had been “one of the first
Westerners to do business in China, Japan, and Korea” t26 Per Katz and Bohbot,
Eisenberg “used these ties to interest China in Israeli weaponry and even donated
his private Boeing 707 to transport the Israeli delegation on that maiden flight to
Beijing in 1979? This and subsequent negotiations saw the Israelis hope “for a
shopping bonanza” from the Chinese. Weapons deals continued through the
1980s but were still conducted “in complete secrecy” up until Israel and China

formally established diplomatic ties in 1992.12

Eisenberg, for a time Israel’s richest man, had close contacts with Israeli
intelligence. In fact, a meeting between Eisenberg and Mossad’s David Kimche
had been the occasion where Robert Maxwell first met Kimche. At that meeting,
Kimche reportedly told Maxwell that the “big question is whether the State of
Israel owns Eisenberg, or whether Eisenberg owns the State of Israel”108 During
that meeting, “Eisenberg developed his views on the need for connections in that
most important of all connected cities, Washington.”2 Thus, in the 1980s,
Eisenberg — who had personally talked to Maxwell about making connections in
Washington alongside top Mossad figures —- was the man who had cemented
Israel's relationship with China. During this time and after, Maxwell himself was
intimately involved in technology transfers and weapons deals in connection with
Soviet and (mainly) Israeli intelligence. Furthermore, Maxwell’s arms dealing
activities, linked to Israeli intelligence, were also directly linked to GMT, which
had developed plans for “a multi-national economic arrangement that would bind
together the US, Israel, and China through a series of credit extensions,
technology transfers, and arms deals” that had allegedly been discussed with then
CIA director Bill Casey.

Author Gordon Thomas also noted that Shaul Eisenberg was intimately
involved with the weapon industry, particularly with Israel Aircraft Industries,
which he then owned. Thomas also noted that Eisenberg’s “senior staff were
drawn from the world of intelligence and included Zvi Zamir, who had run
Mossad from 1968 to 1973, and Amos Manor, the first head of Shin Bet, the
country’s equivalent to the FBI” + It is also worth pointing out some similarities
between Eisenberg and Leslie Wexner, as Wexner also had close ties with Chinese
commercial interests and was one of the first Western businessman, after
Eisenberg, to do business in the East, having partnered with Mast Industries to
that effect in the early 1980s. As previously noted in chapter 14, Wexner had met
with top Israeli officials to discuss opening a joint venture between his company
and Chinese firms in the Golan Heights.

Did the GMT plan discussed in chapter 7 end up serving as a blueprint for
some of the later activities of the intelligence-organized crime networks discussed
in this book? Did Epstein, Mark Middleton, and Southern Air Transport play key
roles in such a plan? Clearly, these events warrant a full investigation — one that
would require access to critical information that more than one presidential
administration has sought to hide from the US public for well over two decades.

Those of us without national security clearances are left to look at a trail of
crumbs, which seem to paint a certain picture and lead us to a particular
conclusion. However, it seems that, unless greater pressure from the public is
applied to these concerns, the true nature of Epstein’s meetings with Middleton
and the real motive behind Epstein’s courting of CIA-linked airlines on Wexner’s
behalf will remain elusive. At the same time, as this book has labored to show, the
US government is clearly in a position where it cannot investigate itself. Indeed, if
any of these threads were to be pulled on, much of the excessive corruption,
espionage, and criminal activity that has filled these pages thus far would quickly

unravel.

Endnotes

OUA WW

Peter D. Franklin, “Rickenbacker May Land World’s Largest Aircraft,’ Columbus Dispatch,
March 3, 1992, O1F.

Franklin, “Rickenbacker May Land,’; Mary Stephens, “Aeroflot Venture Could Open Markets,”
Columbus Dispatch, March 5, 1992, Page 01B.

Franklin, “Rickenbacker May Land.”
Mary Stephens, “Aeroflot Venture.’
Mary Stephens, “Aeroflot Venture.’

Phil Porter, “Aeroflot Invites Local Group to Firm Up Plans in Moscow,’ Columbus Dispatch,
January 16, 1993, 01C.

“Russian Connection-Rickenbacker Runway Ready for Aeroflot,’ Columbus Dispatch, March
17, 1993, 06A.

Porter, “Aeroflot Invites Local Group.’

Porter, “Aeroflot Invites Local Group.’

Porter, “Aeroflot Invites Local Group.’

“Russian Connection-Rickenbacker Runway.’

Steve Stephens, “Aeroflot Flight Lands at Rickenbacker in Trial Run From Russia,’ Columbus
Dispatch, April 26, 1993, 01C.

“Memorandum of Facts and Law in Support of the Defendants Motion to Vacate, Set Aside
or Correct the Sentence Under 28 u.s.c.2255” (US District Court, District of Connecticut,
November 2007), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC 0001474387.pdf.

“Memorandum of Facts.”

Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI,
1st ed (New York: Random House, 1993), 232, https://archive.org/details/outlawbankOOjona.
Beaty and Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank, 233.

Phil Porter, “Cargo Service Targets City-Polar Plans to Land Weekly Flights at Rickenbacker
Starting Sunday,’ Columbus Dispatch, May 12, 1993, sec. 01D, 01D,
https://dispatch.newsbank.com/doc/news/10EQOD9C54B7D92F8?search terms.

Porter, “Cargo Service Targets City.”

Porter, “Cargo Service Targets City.”

Barnet D. Wolf, “Rebuilding Rickenbacker’s Payloads-Hustle and Bustle Missing from Air
Cargo Operations,’ Columbus Dispatch, January 23, 1994, 01D.

Wolf, “Rebuilding Rickenbacker’s Payloads.”

Darris Blackford, “Rickenbacker Attracts Air Transporter,’ Columbus Dispatch, March 13, 1995,
01A.

Blackford, “Rickenbacker Attracts Air Transporter”

William Armbruster, “2 Major Carriers Set to Relocate Midwestern Hubs Aif, Southern Air
Plan Big Expansions,’ Journal of Commerce Online, March 16, 1995, https://www.joc.com/2-
major-carriers-set-relocate-midwestern-hubs-aif-southern-air-plan-big-

expansions 19950316.html.

25

26
27

28
29
30

31
32
33
34
35

36
37
38

39

40

41

42
43

44

45
46

47
48

Bob Fitrakis, “Spook Air” Columbus Alive, April 22, 1999, https://freepress.org/article/spook-
air.

Fitrakis, “Spook Air”

William Armbruster, “Rickenbacker Airport a Growing Cargo Hub,’ Journal of Commerce
Online, August 27, 1995, https://www.joc.com/rickenbacker-airport-growing-cargo-
hub_19950827.html.

Fitrakis, “Spook Air.’

Fitrakis, “Spook Air”

Nigel Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer; She’s the Daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's Manipulating
His Jetset Lifestyle,” Evening Standard (London), January 22, 2001,

THE-DAUGHTER-OF-ROBERT-MAXWELL-AND-1.pdf.

Blackford, “Rickenbacker Attracts Air Transporter.’

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Thomas and Dillon, Israel's Superspy, 54.

CHAPTER 18

PREDATORS

MODELING SCOUTS

he exact date that Jeffrey Epstein began sexually abusing women and

underage girls is unclear. Court documents place the beginning somewhere
in the mid-1980s, specifically around 1985 — the year he met Wexner and around
the time he was alleged to have become affiliated with Robert Maxwell and Israeli
intelligence. One accuser, referred to as Jane Doe #2 in court documents, accused
Epstein of sexually assaulting, abusing, and battering her beginning in 1985, when
she was 23.4 Another accuser in that same lawsuit, Jane Doe #1, said she was 14
years old when Epstein began abusing her in 1990.2 Thus, by the time he began
publicly associating himself with Ghislaine Maxwell after her father’s death in
1991 (and allegedly took on Robert Maxwell’s mantle), Epstein had allegedly
already engaged in horrific acts of sex abuse against young women, including
underage girls.

Though the details of the abuse suffered by his earliest victims are scarce,
much of Epstein’s early sex crimes appear to be linked to his connections to the
modeling industry. It is unknown exactly when his connections to the industry
were made, but he had dated - during the 1980s - then Ford model Eva
Andersson Dubin, a former Miss Sweden who, as mentioned in chapter 16,
accompanied Epstein to the White House on at least one occasion.

Yet, one man in particular — Jean Luc Brunel - was key to Epstein’s activities as
it relates to the modeling industry. Brunel first became prominent in that industry
in his native France in the 1980s through his work as a model scout for the Karin
Models agency in Paris, which he reportedly co-founded.* There, he claimed to
have “launched the careers of some of the most successful models of the era.”
Former models at the time have alleged that Paris's Les Bains nightclub was
“where young women who've starved themselves parade for Jean Luc Brunel.”>
Many of these young women would then attend “lively parties” at Brunel’s
apartment near Karin headquarters. According to the Guardian, his apartment
“also housed a succession of younger models, many in their teens, who arrived
from the US and elsewhere in Europe in search of success. They found they were
expected to share bedrooms and to keep Brunel and his male friends company.”®
Those who declined reportedly weren't given modeling work.

By December 1988, Brunel was featured in a 60 Minutes exposé. The report
detailed that Brunel, among other predatory modeling scouts, had invited
underage girls, many around the age of 15 or 16 years old, to Paris with promises
of a glamorous, European modeling career.4 Some of the girls interviewed for the
report accused Brunel of sexual assault after he had drugged them. Another girl,
who was 19 years old at the time, said Brunel “sabotaged” her career when she
rejected his advances.

Despite the controversy, a year later, Brunel teamed up with Faith Kates to
form Next models, which soon became “one of the most respected agencies in the
industry” Kates claims to have met Epstein through a “mutual friend” in the
1980s, but claims to have lost touch with him in the early 1990s before becoming
reacquainted with him around 2009 or so. Reporting from The Daily Beast
contradicts many of Kates’ claims as Epstein was seen meeting with her in the late
1990s and was regularly seen at Next’s offices during their supposed hiatus.?

From Next’s founding and through much of the 1990s, Brunel and his brother
Arnaud owned about 25 percent of the agency. Arnaud was also employed by
Next as a consultant, where he was paid a base salary of $30,000 a year in addition
to 3% of the company’s annual revenue. Kates, in a 1996 lawsuit, alleged that
Brunel and his brother Arnaud “basically had control of the Florida Next office.’
Kates had sued the Brunels, accusing them of attempting to set up a rival agency
while running Next’s Florida branch.

After the split, Brunel opened New York and Miami branches of Karin
Models. Brunel had taken over Karin Models in 1995, one year before the lawsuit,
and expanded it into the US with modeling agent Joey Hunter. It was during this
period that he reportedly first met and became associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
They were allegedly introduced by Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell had met Brunel in
the 1980s, reportedly in connection with work she was doing for her father,
Robert Maxwell.12 Notably, Maxwell had considerable ties to France, including
French citizenship, as her mother, Betty Maxwell, was French.

During this same period, in 1995, Jerome Bonnouvrier, a French modeling
impresario, told author Michael Gross that “Jean Luc is considered a danger,”
presumably to young women and aspiring models. Sometime between 1995 and
1999, Brunel rented an apartment in Trump Tower, whose owner Donald Trump
was still close to Epstein at that time and who also has had controversial ties to the
modeling industry." The New York Post reported that Brunel was forced to leave

Trump Tower because of his antics late at night with “beautiful women,” a charge
Brunel denied.

Epstein’s relationship with both the Brunels and Kates was unaffected by their
acrimonious split. Epstein was seen at Kates’ Next models “constantly” in the early
2000s and a former Next employee reported being “pulled into a meeting with
Epstein and Kates” at Next’s New York offices in the late 1990s. One former Next
employee told The Daily Beast “I would only see him come in and go straight to
her office with the door closed [... ] It was always like, ‘Get Jeffrey Epstein on the
phone.”8 Another employee at the New York office recalled answering the phone
when Epstein called during this same period. Kates subsequently claimed that
Epstein only visited Next’s New York offices to say hello “on occasion” and
rejected claims that they had any business or financial relationship during this
time.

During this period, however, Epstein dated some of Next’s models, including
Alina Puscau, who he later arranged to work as a Victoria's Secret “angel.” Another
Next model Epstein dated later became a real estate agent and her name, withheld
in press reports on Epstein’s relationship with Next, was also reportedly listed on
Epstein’s flight logs. The Daily Beast also reported that a third Next model was
listed in Epstein’s book of contacts as well as in Epstein’s butler’s notes with the
annotation “visitor’s massage”! She also appears in Epstein’s flight logs once in
2003 and attended several public functions as Epstein’s escort, including to a gala
associated with Next’s founder and owner Faith Kates.

The Daily Beast also reported that Epstein’s “secret” charity organization,
Gratitude America Limited, donated considerable sums associated with Kates-
linked philanthropies as well as to an organization where her son, Dylan Kogan,
was employed.*® Epstein’s Gratitude America, as previously mentioned in chapter
11, also donated to a charity associated with Julian Leese, son of Douglas Leese. It
also donated to charity's associated with his former girlfriend, who was herself a
former model, Eva Andersson Dubin.

After Brunel's split from Kates and Next models, his ties to Epstein deepened
considerably. Between 1999 and 2005, Brunel would fly on Epstein’s private plane
over 20 times and was described as a “regular” at Epstein’s Palm Beach residence.
During Epstein’s time in prison after his first conviction, Brunel visited him
around 70 times. It was at this time that Brunel became close with Ghislaine
Maxwell as well.

During the earlier part of this period, Brunel was still running Karin Models,
which, according to a former employee, was “barely profitable” at the time and
was only kept afloat by cash infusions from Brunel’s brother Arnaud and their
business partner, Etienne des Roys. Both later dumped Jean Luc Brunel in 2003,
putting his entire operation in peril.1¢

Around this time, in 2004, Epstein was seeking to gain his own foot-hold in
the modeling industry as he attempted, but failed, to acquire the US branch of
Elite Models.*4 That same year, the Paris branch of Karin Models sued to force
Brunel to abandon his use of the Karin trademark. In 2005, Brunel rebranded his
agencies in the US under the name MC2. That same year, Epstein created a new
company, registered at his Villard Houses office at 457 Madison Avenue (see
chapters 11 and 12), and offered Brunel a million dollar line of credit. The line of
credi was part of Epstein’s effort to recruit Brunel into a joint venture that would
have created a new modeling agency with Elite Paris.4® That venture fell through
once reports surfaced that Epstein was under investigation for sex trafficking in
Florida. However, MC2’s business continued unimpeded. However, during this
period, Brunel claimed Epstein ordered him to leave Florida and so he “went to
Europe and Asia for a period of time.’

It seems that Epstein had also offered Brunel another million dollar line of
credit to get MC2 back on its feet the same year he sought to go into business with
Elite Paris. MC2’s former bookkeeper Marita Vasquez, in a sworn statement given
to federal investigators in 2010, stated that Epstein had guaranteed a line of credit
of $1 million for MC2 and that he also “directly paid for the visas of models
brought to the US to work for the company”?

At this point, Brunel's significance to Epstein’s sex trafficking activities greatly
increased. Vasquez also testified that the teenage models that Brunel flew in to
“work” for MC2 (and whose visas had been paid for by Epstein) were housed in
the 301 66" Street apartment owned by Ossa Properties — the company of Mark
Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother (see chapter 12). Vasquez stated that the girls
were then “loaned out to wealthy clients” for as much as $100,000 a night. If they
refused to have sex with the “client,” then they weren't paid. Brunel denied these
claims, but they were notably corroborated by the most well-known of Epstein’s
victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

In a 2014 court filing, Giuffre alleged that Brunel offered “girls ‘modeling’ jobs
|... ] Many of the girls came from poor countries or impoverished backgrounds,

and he lured them in with a promise of making good money.” She has also
alleged that she was forced to have sex with Brunel on several occasions. She also
stated that Epstein imported underage girls from France with Brunel’s assistance,
including 12-year-old triplets he had flown from France so he could abuse them as
a “birthday present” to himself. Epstein maintained a residence in Paris, located
in a wealthy area along Avenue Foch, but little about his activities in the country
have been publicly reported.“

Another girl brought into Epstein’s fold by Brunel was reportedly Nadia
Marcinkova, who media reports have claimed was “purchased” by Epstein from
her family in Eastern Europe at age 14 and never even worked as a model.** She
has been referred to as Epstein’s “sex slave” and was subsequently accused of aiding
his sex trafficking operations by recruiting underage girls for Epstein and
pressuring them to engage in sexual activity with him. She was also accused, like
Ghislaine Maxwell, of engaging in sex acts herself with Epstein’s victims as well as
in “threesomes” with Epstein and underage girls.

In 2011, a few years after Epstein’s first stint in prison, Marcinkova founded a
company called Aviloop. Wired described Aviloop in 2019 as a “supremely odd
aviation branding business.”2° Business records list its address as the Ossa
Properties-owned apartment complex at 301 E 66" Street, suggesting it was
linked with the Epstein brothers in some capacity.”

Further evidence of Brunel’s role in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation can be
seen in memos seized from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion by police. One memo,
taken by Epstein’s staff, noted that Brunel had called and left a message for Epstein
that read: “He [Brunel] has a teacher for you to teach you Russian. She is 2 x 8
years old not Blonde. Lessons are free and you can have Ist today if you call.” In
court, the “2 x 8 year old” claim was suggested by lawyers, including Brad
Edwards, as potentially referring to two 8 year old girls.28 However, others believe
it was a coded way of referring to single 16 year old girl.

In addition, Epstein is believed to have had many of his underage victims
photographed in the nude, pictures which were displayed all over his Palm Beach
mansion when it was first raided by police in 2005.22 He was never charged, nor
have any of his accomplices ever been charged, with child pornography. Police
also found that clocks in parts of the house had contained hidden cameras which
filmed many of the girls while inside the house and potentially some of their sex

acts with Epstein and his wealthy “friends.” Those images were stored on a
computer hard drive also found in the residence.

Vanity Fair reported that Ghislaine had openly stated that, in addition to
Epstein’s residences in Palm Beach and New York, Epstein’s “island had been
completely wired for video.’ Those in whom Maxwell had confided this
information were left with the impression “that she [Maxwell] and Epstein were
videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as blackmail.’22 More
on the hidden camera/hard drive aspects of Epstein’s operation were previously
discussed in chapter 12.

Brunel, like Epstein himself, died under what some regard as suspicious
circumstances while in prison. Brunel was detained in December 2020 in
connection with a French investigation into Epstein’s sex crimes in that country
and was found hung in his cell in February 2022.24 The death was quickly ruled a
suicide.

In addition to prominent modeling agencies, Epstein also had connections to
prominent fashion designers. For instance, Tom Ford was listed in Epstein’s book
of contacts at the time when Ford was creative director of Gucci, a post he held
from 1994 until 2004. Ford has been routinely criticized for using naked women
and/or crudely objectifying women in ad campaigns.*2 Ford is listed alongside his
long-time and recently deceased partner, Richard Buckley, in Epstein’s contact
book. Buckley was a well-known fashion journalist, described as “a titan of the
fashion media world” who worked for outlets including Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Other figures in the fashion industry in Epstein’s book of contacts include
models Janice Dickinson, Naomi Campbell, and Chris Royer. Heidi Klum has also
been named by Epstein victims as having flown on Epstein’s private plane, a
charge she denies. Klum, for years, was notably the “biggest star” and top featured
model of the Wexner-owned lingerie brand, Victoria's Secret. Epstein repeatedly
used his connection to Victoria's Secret via Wexner to lure young women and girls

into his sex trafficking enterprise.

VICTORIA’S SECRETS

hile Epstein was involved with Next models and Jean Luc Brunel, he was

becoming increasingly involved in the affairs of the Wexner-owned lingerie
brand, Victoria’s Secret. Wexner had acquired Victoria's Secret in 1982, well before
he met Epstein, after its previous owner, Roy Raymond, was on the verge of
bankruptcy.* By the time Epstein linked up with Brunel in 1995, Victoria’s Secret
had started its iconic lingerie fashion show, which later became a televised
spectacle replete with celebrities and scantily clad models. For years, until it ended
in 2019, the show attracted “more viewers than all other fashion shows
combined.”°° The fashion show was run by L Brands’ chief marketing officer, Ed
Razek, who appears in Epstein’s black book of contacts and was later accused of
inappropriate behavior toward company models.*4

Victoria's Secret’s clout in the industry was something Epstein was known to
use on several occasions in order to grant him access to women he would abuse or
attempt to abuse. Several former aspiring models have recounted how Epstein
portrayed himself as either a scout or even the “owner” of the lingerie brand.
These women include Alicia Arden, who was reportedly assaulted by Epstein in
1997 after being invited by Epstein to audition for the Victorias Secret catalog.
Another was Elizabeth Tai who was introduced to Epstein by a booking agent who
notably referred to Epstein as “one of the important people in modeling.”

Tai later told the New York Post that the booking agent had also told her that
“this man [Epstein] is in charge of Victoria’s Secret and he’s going to change your
life”38 Upon meeting Epstein, Tai attempted to show Epstein her portfolio and he
instead attempted to sexually assault her before she escaped. Three other models
subsequently testified in a court case that Epstein had used his modeling industry
connections as a lure.3? Yet another woman, identified as Jane Doe #3 in court,
was brought to Epstein by a friend who described him as “a caring man who could
help with her modeling career.’ Upon meeting, she, too, was sexually assaulted 42

Epstein apparently used this lure with so many aspiring models that media
reports have since characterized the situation as “an Epstein-Victoria’s Secret pimp
pipeline”® A former Manhattan-based modeling agent told the New York Post that
“He [Epstein] portrayed himself as the back door to get a girl into Victoria’s
Secret. Some of those girls got in.... Not all the girls sent to him got jobs, but a lot

of them did” As previously mentioned, one of them was Epstein’s former
“girlfriend” and Next model, Alina Puscau.

Ghislaine Maxwell also played a role in Epstein’s activities as it related to
Victorias Secret. Per the New York Post, Maxwell was a “constant fixture” at
Victoria's Secret events. According to one Manhattan model entrepreneur quoted
by the Post: “They were always [at] these really trashy shows full of rich men in the
audience. Ghislaine acted as the kind of Nazi guard, telling everyone where they
were sitting in the audience and that she had new ‘pop tarts, which is what she
called the young models.” This further suggests that “young models,” lured in
through Victoria's Secret and other avenues, were a key target of Epstein and
Maxwell's for recruitment into their sex trafficking operation.

The first sex crimes of Epstein’s that involved him using Victoria’s Secret as a
lure reportedly took place in the late 1990s. However, it was allegedly known to
the company years prior that Epstein had posed as a Victoria’s Secret modeling
recruiter. According to former CEO of Victorias Secret Direct, Cindy Fedus-
Fields, an executive entered her office in 1993 to tell her that Epstein, then
Wexner’s money manager, had been posing as a Victorias Secret modeling
recruiter. “I asked this executive to call Les directly and tell him what was
happening. She did, and Les told her he would put a stop to it. The point being
that inappropriate behavior was reported to Les sometime in ‘93% In addition, as
will be mentioned at the end of this chapter, Epstein appears to have recruited
Melanie Walker as early as 1992 with promises of a career modeling for Victoria's
Secret.

GALLERINAS

EF addition to targeting aspiring models, Epstein and Maxwell also targeted
aspiring fine artists and musicians. Maxwell reportedly referred to this category
of girls/women as “gallerinas.” Friends of Maxwell’s have claimed that, on
Epstein’s behalf, she would “trawl high-end art galleries and auction houses
looking to find” these “gallerinas,” who she would then take to meet Epstein.*® Just
as she was a “fixture” at Victoria's Secret events, Maxwell was also a regular at
Sotheby’s, the auction house owned by Wexner’s mentor A. Alfred Taubman and
where Wexner himself sat on the board (see chapter 13). She also was a “familiar
presence” at the other main auction house, Christie’s. One former Maxwell friend
stated that “The art world is full of pretty young girls and many of them are young
and broke.... You’d see her [Maxwell] everywhere, often with beautiful blonde
girls in tow” while at art gallery and auction house functions. Another one of
Epstein's many “girlfriends” during the 1990s was Shelley Lewis, who was
reportedly a “gallerina” herself, having been introduced to Epstein while working
in the Contemporary Art Department at Christies New York.*4 In addition,
Tiffany Dubin, another Epstein “girlfriend” from the period, was the fashion
director at Sotheby’s.“8
The numerous connections to the Epstein-Wexner nexus made places like
Sotheby's a controlled, safe environment for Maxwell to seek out, and lure in,
unwitting “gallerinas.’ An additional benefit, from Maxwell's perspective, would
have been the secretive dynamic of the major auction houses, which have severe
restrictions around photography, meaning there is no photographic evidence of
Maxwells alleged “recruitment” activities at those places. The claim that she
would attend these place with “beautiful blondes in tow” also suggests that the
lack of photography made it easy to parade around an entourage of
Epstein/Maxwell victims and potentially arrange “dates” between those young
women and the wealthy, elite clientele that also frequented these auction houses.
Epstein and Maxwell also sought out “gallerinas” at art schools in New York,
specifically the New York Academy of Art. The most well-known Epstein victim
recruited from the art world, Maria Farmer, first encountered Epstein while a
student at the Academy. Epstein served on the academy's board from 1987 to
1994. Epstein reportedly bought a painting from Maria Farmer at a gallery show

tied to her graduation and she was then employed by Epstein beginning in 1995
after he had promised to help her with her career. Epstein had originally
promised her work in acquiring art on his behalf, but she also spent time working
in other capacities, such as managing the entrance to one of his New York
properties. She and her then underage sister, Annie Farmer, were subsequently
abused and targeted by Epstein as well as Ghislaine Maxwell. Maria Farmer has
accused Eileen Guggenheim, then-dean of the academy and the current chairman
of its board, of facilitating and enabling Epstein’s predatory behavior towards her.
Epstein also had a close friendship with Stuart Pivar, the co-founder of the
academy, and the two had reportedly first met at the New York home of the
corporate raider James Goldsmith in the early 1970s.*4

Aside from the New York Academy of Art, Epstein also had connections to
the art world through art dealers like Leah Kleman, who later told Bloomberg that
Epstein sought to collect art with “shock value” in order to make an impression on
others. He is also alleged to have recruited victims from performing-arts high
schools in Manhattan.°3

In addition, as previously mentioned in chapter 11, Epstein attempted to
recruit talented young female musicians from the Interlochen Centre for the Arts
in Michigan, which he had once attended as a teen. His status as a prominent
donor afforded him access to the exclusive fine arts summer school. He was even
allowed to build what was formerly known as the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship
Lodge — which was located close to a junior girls’ camp.* He also hosted
fundraisers and events for Interlochen alumni at his New York office and
townhouse.>=

An unidentified woman sued Epstein’s estate in January 2020, claiming that
Epstein and Maxwell recruited her from Interlochen when she was 13 years. She
was reportedly approached by Epstein and Maxwell while sitting alone between
classes. The two claimed to be “arts patrons” that were interested in offering her a
scholarship. Epstein paid for some of her music lessons and sent money to her
mother and began making “sexual comments” as the grooming process wore on.°2
She later testified during the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and accused Maxwell and
Epstein of molesting and abusing her.>4

Nadia Bjorlin was also 13 years old when Epstein and Maxwell attempted to
groom her at Interlochen. Her father had recently died before she attended and
her mother, Fary Bjorlin told the Daily Mail in 2011 that “Epstein was a big donor

and he heard about Nadia and that her father had died, so she was vulnerable, and
he contacted her. He said, ‘Here’s my number:”=2 When Bjorlin met Epstein and
asked what he wanted with her daughter, he promised that he only wanted to help
her singing career and “be like a godfather” to her. Bjorlin was uncomfortable with
Epstein from that point on and she said she never let her daughter meet him alone.

Epstein and Maxwell also attempted to recruit cellist Melissa Solomon at
Interlochen, beginning when she was 14 years old. Solomon said she maintained
ties with Epstein and Maxwell, but was never abused by the pair. Their
relationship ended when she refused to recruit young girls for Epstein from New
York’s Juilliard School and also declined an offer to meet Prince Andrew.

Epstein also attempted to recruit attendees of Juilliard on other occasions,
reportedly as early as 1983. That year he contacted the school looking for a young
dance instructor and one attendee of the school obliged. She was flown to Palm
Beach to teach dance to his then guests, two Swedish models, one of whom was
Eva Andersson-Dubin. Epstein had enticed her to continue working for him by
offering to pay her senior year at Juilliard and to donate to the school. For reasons

unknown, he never followed through.

BROKEN PROMISES

b addition to the girls lured into his sex trafficking operation from the worlds of

modeling, art, and music, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sought to use
many of the same tactics to bring in vulnerable local girls who they could exploit
to their benefit. Many would become sexually abused by Epstein, as well as
Maxwell herself, while others — depending on their reactions during the grooming
process — were cultivated to serve other roles in the operation, such as that of a
recruiter.

For instance, in New York, some victims that have come forward have detailed
how they were lured into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation “under the guise of
being recruited to work” while in high school. This was a lure similar to that used
on aspiring models, artists, and musicians — ie. offers of career assistance.
However, in other cases, they expressly targeted teens and young women who
weren't just looking for career boost, but were economically disadvantaged. In
these cases, the lure was often simply money and vague promises of a better life.

In the 2021 criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Minor Victim-4, who
testified under her first name, Carolyn, was victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s in Florida
who was sexually abused by him up to three times a week for several years.
Carolyn testified that Ghislaine Maxwell routinely called her to schedule
“massages” and eventually invited the young girl to Epstein’s private island.
Carolyn was only 14 when Epstein began to abuse her and she received a few
hundred dollars after giving Epstein a massage that finished with him
masturbating while he touched her.

Carolyn told the court, “I was young and $300 was a lot of money to me.’ She
also testified that Epstein molested her more than 100 times between 2001 and
2004 at his Palm Beach mansion. Once Carolyn was inside the ring, she was
offered further financial incentives by Epstein, Maxwell, and their close
collaborators to engage in more sexually focused behavior. Carolyn also testified
that alleged co-conspirator Sarah Kellen snapped nude photos of her on Epstein’s
orders while there was no one else present. She told the court that Kellen called
her to tell her that she would get paid $500 to $600 if Kellen could take more
nude photographs of her.

Epstein eventually pressured Carolyn into bringing him her younger friends,
and she ultimately recruited three girls who were approximately the same age she
was at the time. She told the court in 2021 that she was paid $600 for luring in
other victims.

Other girls were offered a mix of money and promises that Epstein could help
them receive an education at places like Harvard. In court testimony from 2021, a
victim referred to as Jane Doe #11 stated that: “He promised me that he would
write me a letter of recommendation for Harvard if I got the grades and scores
needed for admission. His word was worth a lot, he assured me, as he was in the
midst of funding and leading Harvard's studies on the human brain, and the
president was his friend.”® Epstein, once in a locked room with Jane Doe #11
after luring her in with such promises, threatened to kill her and then raped her.

Another woman, Marijke Chartouni also testified to having a similar
experience, but she was lured in, not by Epstein, but by Ghislaine Maxwell. She
stated that “She [Maxwell] told me he went to Cooper Union. He was a
mathematical genius. That he had favorite girls that he would take to Chanel for
15-minute, all-you-can-buy shopping trips. She told me his right-hand person had
connection to the arts and the fashion world, and she could help me”

Perhaps the best known of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, was also
recruited with similar promises at age 16 by Ghislaine Maxwell. She was working
at Trump's Mar-a-Lago when approached by Maxwell. Maxwell's “sales pitch” to
Giuffre was summed up by the New York Times as “If she gave a wealthy man a
massage, a whole world of opportunity would open to her.’ “If the guy likes you,
then, you know, it will work out for you. You'll travel. You'll make good money.
You'll be educated,” Maxwell reportedly told Giuffre.®>

While many of Epstein’s publicly known victims had experiences very similar
to those described above, some of the economically disadvantaged girls recruited
by Epstein and Maxwell were cultivated for other uses. Take, for example, the case
of Haley Robson. The New York Times reported that Haley Robson was a 16 year-
old high-school student when she was approached by an acquaintance at a Palm
Beach swimming pool.®° This acquaintance asked her if she wanted to make extra
money giving massages to a local billionaire. At the time, Robson was a Palm
Beach Community College student from nearby Loxahatchee and she soon had
her own experience of Jeffrey Epstein’s wandering hands and dismissing his

advances early on.

Her rejection of his unwanted sexual advances saw Epstein offer Robson a
different way “to make extra money.’ No longer seen as easily exploited sexual
prey, Epstein instead began to cultivate, groom, and coerce Robson into recruiting
other young local girls to “massage” him. Haley was later accused of “rounding-up”
dozens of high-school girls from low income rural populations just outside of
Palm Beach for Epstein and Maxwell. Robson received $200 for each new
“masseuse” she brought to Epstein’s home, according to police reports.

Court documents suggest that Epstein thought that a young Miss Robson
targeting these girls from poorer areas on his behalf would attract less unwanted
attention and made it less likely that potentially distressed victims would go to the
authorities. In a later court deposition, Robson stated, “I didn’t have to convince
them. I proposed to them. They took it? In October 2020, it was reported that
interviews of Robson from around 2005 suggested that she “truly believed she was
helping [these girls] by setting up these appointments with Epstein.”

Robson famously compared herself to the so-called Hollywood Madam,
Heidi Fleiss, in one interview with Palm Beach police. She told police that she
was scolded by Epstein for bringing back a woman who was apparently too old for
him (aged 23), with the detective noting that Robson had been told by Epstein,
“the younger the better.”

Other victims of Epstein’s have stated that, in addition to luring women and
girls in with promises to help them, Epstein also perversely claimed to some of his
victims that being sexually abused by him was also a form of “help.” One victim,
identified as Jane Doe #9, stated that “When I was 15 years old, I flew on Jeffrey
Epstein’s plane to Zorro Ranch, where I was sexually molested by him for many
hours. What I remember most vividly was him explaining to me how beneficial

the experience was for me and how much he was helping me to grow? 2

“THEY RE NOTHING, THESE GIRLS”

Fen from the role played by Epstein himself, Ghislaine Maxwell arguably
layed the most critical role in the sex trafficking operation. She was not only
instrumental in recruiting girls into the operation, she was also key in recruiting
blackmail victims using similar tactics (discussed more in the next chapter).

When it came to recruiting unwitting underage girls, Maxwell would feign
friendship with victims, take them shopping, and act interested in their lives and
problems. She made them feel special and would promise them that her
“boyfriend” Jeffrey Epstein could help them. Once they were lured into one of
Epstein’s residences and trusted Maxwell, she would normalize outrageous and
dangerous behavior and seek to erode their personal boundaries, priming them
for extreme abuse at the hands of Epstein’s and his associates, including herself.

Named in the 2021 indictment against Ghislaine Maxwell is a woman who
testified under the pseudonym “Kate” and was also referred to as “Minor Victim-
3? She detailed how, after initially being recruited, Ghislaine Maxwell
systematically groomed her. Kate says that she was approximately 18 years-old
when Epstein and Maxwell invited her to the Palm Beach estate in Florida. She
recounts that it had a beautiful swimming pool and that the walls were littered
with photographs of naked young girls. “They were in almost every room,” Kate
stated, going on to say of Maxwell, “I was excited to be friends with her. She was
exciting... She was everything I wanted to be? 2

Kate confided in Maxwell all the details about her problems at home, her
mother’s poor health, and her desire to pursue a career in music. Maxwell showed
interest in Kate, telling the teenager about her boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, who she
described as a wealthy philanthropist with a passion for “helping” young people.
Kate would testify that she was left with the distinct impression that it “would be
great for me to meet him” and stated that Maxwell “said he was going to love me
and that I was exactly the kind of person he would help.”

When Kate entered her guest room at Epstein’s Palm Beach residence, she was
surprised to find that there was a schoolgirl outfit waiting for her on the bed. Kate
testifies that she asked Maxwell what the costume was for, and Maxwell handed
her a tray and told her she “thought it would be fun” for her to dress up while she
brought Epstein tea. Soon after entering the Palm Beach property, Epstein

initiated low level sexual contact with Kate who recounts in court, “She asked me
if I had fun and told me I was such a good girl and that I was one of his favorites.”

On one occasion, Maxwell called Kate saying that Epstein’s massage therapist
had canceled and asked if Kate could “do her a favor because [she] had such
strong hands.’ Kate testified that, during this meeting, Epstein was wearing only a
robe, which he soon slipped off, leaving him naked. The sudden shock caused
Kate alarm, but she couldn't easily escape the encounter as Maxwell was standing
in the doorway. According to Kate's testimony, Maxwell handed her some massage
oils and quickly shut the door. Shortly thereafter, Epstein first initiated unwanted
sexual contact with her.

After the event, Maxwell allegedly asked Kate: “How’d it go? Did you have
fun? Was it good?” Maxwell implied to Kate that the unsettling, abusive
encounters were normal and meant to be enjoyable for her as well as Epstein. On
the third occasion where Kate encountered Epstein, Maxwell told Kate to “have a
good time,’ before shutting the door. This normalization of abuse was also
followed closely by a compliment for her compliance. After that third occasion,
Kate recalled Maxwell saying: “You're such a good girl. I’m so happy you were able
to come... he obviously likes you a lot.”

Maxwell’s interest in Kate, and the other victims she groomed in much the
same way, was feigned so as to create the perception that they were becoming
friends, and that Maxwell was someone Kate could trust and look up to.
Simultaneously, Maxwell would tell adult friends in her elite New York and UK
social circles that the underage girls she helped to traffic were nothing more than
“trash” One anonymous friend quoted in Vanity Fair not only revealed that
Maxwell “spoke glibly and confidently about getting girls to sexually service
Epstein,’ she described her young victims by saying, “they’re nothing, these girls.
They are trash.”

Maxwell was an expert at acting as though very bizarre behavior was
completely normal. The victim who testified as Carolyn (mentioned in the
previous section) also stated that Maxwell would normalize the abuse by entering
Epstein’s massage room while Carolyn was nude. Carolyn states that Maxwell felt
her hips, buttocks, and breasts, telling the young girl that she “had a great body for
Mr. Epstein.” Carolyn also went on to reveal that, on that occasion, Maxwell
groped her breasts before leaving the room. Maxwell's behavior not only sought to
make Epstein’s victims become more compliant, but to also blur and erode their

personal boundaries. With Kate, she worked slowly in an apparent effort to give
her reassurance and confidence, gaslighting her to believe that Epstein’s and
Maxwell's behavior was normal, while also frequently crossing and blurring Kate's
personal boundaries.

Kate’s recollection of Maxwell's behavior is remarkably similar to the accounts
of several other victims, who have portrayed Maxwell as central to the sex
trafficking ring as well as an active participant in their sexual abuse. Epstein would
tell those he sought to impress that Maxwell was merely a former girlfriend of his
who had “fallen on hard times” and who he was hoping to help. Instead,
however, former employees of Epstein’s, like his former butler Alfredo Rodriguez,
described her in a deposition as “the boss” of the entire operation. Epstein’s
former house manager, Janusz Banasiak, described Maxwell and Epstein as
“partners in business.’ Maxwell was also the person who developed the methods
for recruiting and who managed the network of recruiters. Per the New York Times,
Maxwell told these recruiters to “target young, financially desperate women, and
to promise them help furthering their education and careers.’

Maxwell also trained victims in sex techniques. This sometimes began with
Maxwell teaching victims “massage” techniques, but several victims — including
Virginia Giuffre and Sarah Ransome - allege that she also trained them in sexual
techniques.” She would reportedly sometimes instruct girls in what to do while
they were “massaging” Epstein.

She was apparently so prolific in these efforts that references to her behavior
can be found in British media reports as far back as 2003, several years before
Epstein was first investigated for sex trafficking. A 2003 article from the UK’s
Evening Standard states: “Salacious reports have crossed the Atlantic about
Ghislaine hosting bizarre parties at her house to which she invites a dozen or so
young girls, then brandishes a whip and teaches them how to improve their sexual
techniques” Z It turns out that those “salacious reports” were ultimately true and
their appearance in press reports well before Epstein was ever formally
investigated also reflects how some of their most sinister acts were, more often
than not, hidden in plain sight.

Though there are a wealth of reports on Maxwell's grooming tactics based on
victim testimony, it appears that she engaged in other activities that were aimed at
facilitating the abuse of minors in other ways. For example, the reason Maxwell
reportedly got her license to pilot a helicopter was “so she could transport anyone

she liked without pilots knowing who they were.”“2 Given that Maxwell is now a
convicted sex trafficker and helped traffic women and girls on a near industrial
scale, it is worth re-examining her reasons for obtaining that helicopter license
through that lens.

Per Maxwell's reasoning, her ability to pilot a helicopter would have afforded
her the ability to transport any of these trafficked girls anywhere without anyone,
aside from her and Epstein and their accomplices, knowing. This is particularly
sinister considering that several Epstein victims, including Sarah Ransome, have
reported that their passports and phones were seized upon flying to Epstein’s
island.

The known seizure of victim documentation combined with Maxwell’s desire
to “transport anyone” she chose unseen suggests that the full dimensions of the
Epstein/Maxwell sex trafficking operation could be much larger and more
disturbing than previously understood. Indeed, while most media reports have
focused on the pair's sex trafficking activities in the domestic United States, their
operation was global in scope, targeting women and girls in Eastern Europe,
Southeast Asia, and South America as well as the United States.°° However, of the
few official investigations that have been conducted, they have been rather limited
in scope and little remains known of the international dimensions of the
Epstein/Maxwell sex trafficking operation.

ACCOMPLICES

F or Jeffrey Epstein to have a steady supply of suitable victims who met his very

specific criteria, he needed a team of collaborators to organize the
“masseuses” and ensure their compliance through constant reassurance, a false
sense of emotional support, and/or the use of threats. This team, which ultimately
organized the systematic abuse of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls, was headed
by Maxwell, but also included several others, such as Nadia Marcinkova, discussed
earlier in this chapter. Epstein and Maxwell may have been running the show, but
without the help of their alleged co-conspirators, their operation would probably
have been difficult to manage, would have taken place on a smaller scale, and likely
would have been exposed much earlier.

One of these key co-conspirators was Sarah Kellen. Former employees of
Epstein’s have alleged that Kellen was “like an assistant to Ghislaine” and was just
below Maxwell “in the chain of command.”®4
named in court cases as a co-conspirator in the Epstein/Maxwell sex trafficking

Kellen has also been regularly

operation and she, like Maxwell, was instrumental in the recruitment and
grooming of young girls. Sarah Ransome, for instance, has alleged that “It was
Ghislaine and Sarah Kellen that showed me how to please Jeffrey,’ and described
to the New York Times how Kellen would escort her to Epstein’s massage room and
then instruct her in how to “best satisfy him sexually 8% The West Palm Beach
lawyer who has represented several accusers in lawsuits targeting Kellen, Spencer
T. Kuvin, stated that Kellen “saw herself as the boss,’ particularly at Epstein’s Palm
Beach residence. Kuvin has also alleged that “Sarah was really running that
organization, bringing girls and getting them in and out of the Palm Beach
home.”® It was also Kellen’s role to greet the victims arriving at that particular
mansion, where she would then escort them to a room with a massage table where
Epstein would be waiting, usually wearing nothing but a towel or a bathrobe.
Sarah Kellen reportedly grew up as a Jehovah's Witness and was reportedly
married off by the time she was 17. In 2020, Sarah Kellen’s parents stated that they
had known virtually nothing about their daughter's occupation because they had
become estranged from Kellen when she was 18 or 19 years-old. They also
claimed that Kellen, around that same time, was recruited to work for Epstein.
They have also argued that “Kellen should be treated as a victim rather than a co-

conspirator because she, too, was groomed and manipulated after falling out with
her family and going to work for Epstein in her teens.”®>

Also around that time, Kellen’s marriage to Noa Bonk, who she had met
through the church, quickly soured, allegedly because Kellen was more interested
in a “glamorous life of modeling and fashion.”®° Kellen was then expelled from the
church for allegedly leading an “immoral lifestyle” which included reported nude
modeling. However, later reports have claimed that this “nude modeling” was
really “a modeling assignment for a life drawing art class rather than pornography.’
Sarah Kellen’s mother, Mary Kellen, later told reporters that her daughter “wasn’t
mistreated or shunned, she made her own choices. She turned her back on
Jehovah God, her conduct went against the standards.” Kellen later married a
NASCAR driver in 2013 and changed her last name to Vickers.

Alongside Sarah Kellen, another alleged co-conspirator was Polish born
Adriana Ross. Ross was a former Playboy model who moved to Florida in 2002,
where she was soon hired to work at the Epstein estate. Ross, who sometimes
referred to herself Adriana Mucinska, was a frequent flier onboard Epstein’s
private plane, infamously known as the Lolita Express, with flight records showing
that Ross had accompanied US President Bill Clinton on the plane, among others.
Ross was questioned in a 2010 civil suit that focused on Prince Andrew's
participation within the Epstein/Maxwell sex ring. Ross has repeatedly refused to
comment, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights while under official
questioning.

Another of the core members of Epstein and Maxwell’s team of recruiters and
assistants was Lesley Groff, who was officially Epstein’s Executive Assistant. Groff
coordinated the travel and transport of Epstein and his entourage, including
underage girls who were being trafficked specifically for sex. She also repeated
promises of Epstein’s and/or Maxwell’s to victims that Epstein would help them
financially or with their careers and, in at least one case, monitored victims’ weight
on Epstein’s behalf. A 2017 lawsuit alleged that Groff was also responsible for
arranging the massage itineraries of many of Epstein’s victims. She is also said to
have taken steps to ensure the girls complied with the rules of behavior imposed
by Epstein, Maxwell, and others.®2

Lesley Groff was treated well by Epstein and he reportedly saw her as a vital
member of his organization. Her other duties in his employ also included “making
appointments for Epstein as directed by him, taking his messages, and setting up

high-level meetings with CEOs, business executives, scientists, politicians,
celebrities, charitable organizations, and universities”22 In 2004, when she
announced that she was pregnant and that she intended to leave his employ,
Epstein offered to buy her a Mercedes and offered to pay for a full-time nanny.
Epstein told reporters at the time “There is no way that I could lose Lesley to
motherhood”? In that same article, Epstein also referred to Groff as “an extension
of my brain”? She is believed to have received a salary of around $200,000 per
year.

Another apparent co-conspirator is Claire Hazell, who later married an
aristocrat of the Guinness brewing family, Edward Guinness, Earl of Iveagh. She
became Claire Iveagh upon their marriage in 2001. Hazell reportedly worked for
Epstein throughout the 1990s, but few specifics are known of her work for him.?
However, after Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest on charges that focused on Maxwell's
sex trafficking activities during the 1990s, Hazell-Iveagh was sought by federal
investigators as she was believed to have knowledge of Maxwell’s illegal activities
during that time. Hazell-Iveagh appears on the flight logs 32 times between
1998 and 2000 and appeared in Epstein’s black book of contacts under her
married name. Some Epstein victims, like Maria Farmer, have alleged that Hazell-
Iveagh was a co-conspirator in the sex trafficking operation and played a role
similar to that later played by Sarah Kellen.

Hazell-Iveagh appears to have been brought into Epstein’s world during her
time studying at Ohio State University in the 1990s.2° The university is heavily
funded by and closely associated with Leslie Wexner. Hazell-Iveagh reportedly
had a modeling agency in Columbus, Ohio, at the time and a friend of hers from
this period recalled Hazell-Iveagh constantly being at Epstein’s “beck and call”2°
Hazell-Iveagh also reportedly took vacations with her boyfriends at Epstein’s
island. Given Epstein’s interest in recruiting models during this period, Hazell’s
alleged knowledge of Maxwell’s trafficking activity at the time and Epstein’s
simultaneous connection with suspect airlines in Columbus, Hazell’s activities in
the early 1990s and her modeling agency should be more heavily scrutinized by
investigators.

GIRLFRIENDS FOR THE RICH AND FAMOUS

n examining the different milieus in which Epstein and Maxwell recruited

young women and girls, it seems that, depending on how those girls reacted to
the stressful situations in which they were placed as well as other factors, they
were placed in separate tiers that served different, complementary functions to the
overall sex trafficking and influence operations of Epstein and Maxwell.

For instance, several former models, former recruiters, and others who ended
up becoming associated with Epstein were seen and treated as part of a higher tier
than those women and girls deemed more vulnerable and exploitable. Often these
were not underage woman, but women in their early 20s and, unlike the exploited
and abused girls mentioned in earlier parts of this chapter, Epstein appeared to
keep his promises to “help” them with their careers and problems. Yet, most of
these women, despite the better treatment, seem to have still been used in
influence operations by Epstein.

One of these women is Francis Jardine. As mentioned in chapter 16, Francis
Jardine was a former model from South Africa who was alleged to have been in a
relationship with Epstein in the 1990s, as revealed during the trial of Ghislaine
Maxwell. Jardine flew on Epstein’s plane 12 times and appears in his contact book.
She also accompanied Epstein to the Clinton White House alongside Eva
Andersson Dubin, who Epstein is said to have dated between 1983 and 1991.74
Jardine reportedly first met Epstein while working as a model and was housed in
the apartments owned by Ossa Properties tied to his sex trafficking operation.

However, unlike other women recruited from the modeling world and housed
in those apartments, Jardine’s opinion of Epstein, even today, is remarkably
different than that held by most women, particularly after his perversions became
public knowledge. In a statement to the Daily Mail in 2022, Jardine said:

He tried to expose me to a larger world, open my mind and stimulate my belief in myself that I
could be many things as I was sorely lacking in true confidence when I first met him.... I asked
Jeffrey for help, he was many things to me over a period of years, trying to address the various
areas that were holding me back as a human being, helping me find my way into a future that
would suit my level of sensitivity and my proclivity to jump into relationships too quickly. He
wanted me to develop skills and shared the importance of making the right choices. People
around me misinterpreted my relationship with him because he was definitely more way out

than the average man’s idea of what a woman could be or should be to a man.28

She also stated that she would “always be grateful to have known him
[Epstein] no matter how people have slated him,” adding that “I loved him and
grieve for the way his life has turned out. I would have wished I could have
expressed myself in a way that might have saved his life.”

Needless to say, Jardine — despite “dating” Epstein at a time when he was
dating multiple other women, including Ghislaine Maxwell and others — held
Epstein in the highest esteem. It shows that some women with whom he was
associated were left with a strong impression that he had truly helped them,
whereas most women he encountered and whom he abused were given empty
promises of such help and left battered and broken.

This, in addition to Jardine’s known activities during and after her relationship
with Epstein, provides corroboration for the theory that some women were
singled out for “star” treatment by Epstein and were “helped” with their careers
and/or paired up with powerful, wealthy men in Epstein’s broader network who
would then become their husbands.

Sometime in the 1990s, after her relationship with Epstein ended, Jardine
married John Deuss, the oil trader with deep ties to Marc Rich and Ted Shackley.
As noted in previous chapters, Deuss, like Epstein, Khashoggi, and others in this
network, had a reputation for using beautiful young women, usually models, to
secure favors and loyalty (as well as potential blackmail) from business
associates. 122

Another woman Epstein “dated” while dating Jardine and Maxwell (and
apparently others) was Celina Midelfart. Midelfart was another woman who
accompanied Epstein to the Clinton White House, where she escorted Epstein to
the executive residence twice in a single day+7 Midelfart has since claimed that
she and Epstein did not date but had a “business relationship” between 1994 and
1997, though several witnesses at Ghislaine Maxwell's trial contradicted this

claim.122

Shortly after she stopped dating Epstein, she began dating Epstein’s then-
associate Donald Trump. Trump reportedly dumped Midelfart to date his current
wife, Melania. As previously mentioned in chapter 12, Epstein and Maxwell
claimed to have originally introduced Donald and Melania Trump. However, it
also seems possible that Epstein may have introduced Trump to Celina Midelfart,
his girlfriend prior to Melania, as well.

Given that several of these “higher tier’ women who were Epstein’s

“girlfriends” at the time accompanied him to the White House, it seems likely that

the other, anonymous women who also accompanied him there, of which there
are four, had similar relationships with Epstein. It is also suggestive of the fact that
some of Epstein’s “girlfriends” may have been used as part of influence operations
on White House grounds, some potentially involving Bill Clinton or other high-
ranking administration officials. Several cabinet members had known
relationships with Epstein, including Bill Richardson, Robert Rubin, and Larry
Summers, and one of Epstein’s closest White House contacts - Mark Middleton —
flew with Epstein to the Bahamas (and possibly Epstein’s Caribbean island) after
one White House visit. Of those Clinton administration contacts, Richardson, as
well as former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, were later accused of
participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation and of abusing underage girls. It
is entirely plausible that Richardson and Mitchell could have first been introduced
to Epstein’s operation via his visits to the White House where he was
accompanied by one of his many “girlfriends.”

Another former model who seems to have operated in this higher strata of
Epstein’s sex trafficking and influence operations is Nicole Junkermann of
Germany. Junkermann was a model represented by Elite Model Management in
1995. This was the same modeling agency that represented Epstein’s and
Maxwell’s associate, supermodel Naomi Campbell. As previously mentioned in
this chapter, Epstein attempted but failed to acquire Elite’s American branch in the
early 2000s. In addition to her modeling career, Junkermann was also a talented
businesswoman with a peculiar amount of access to wealthy elites from a young
age. It is unclear when the glamorous German model turned business woman
originally connected with Epstein, but Junkermann did attend Harvard at a time
when Epstein’s relationship with the university was considerable.

Junkermann also ended up escorting wealthy, older men at social events,
including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose ties to the Maxwell siblings are
discussed in chapter 20. Junkermann also flew on Epstein’s plane on several
occasions, including when she alone accompanied Epstein to the UK for a
meeting at the Wexner-owned Foxcote house in early September 2002. As
discussed in chapter 14, employees working at Foxcote during that meeting saw
Junkermann and a brunette woman, both glamorously dressed, escorting Epstein
on either arm. Epstein then brought Junkermann and the other women to two US
senators with whom he was meeting, suggesting that the two women were meant
to entice the senators for some purpose, possibly to influence their views on the
upcoming effort to invade Iraq.

Junkermann later became a business partner in an Epstein-funded company
chaired by his close associate, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.1% The
company, Carbyne911 and formerly known as Reporty, was closely associated
with Israeli intelligence at the time Junkermann served on its board (see chapter
21).1% In 2017, she married the Italian aristocrat, Count Ferdinando Maria
Brachetti Peretti, who is CEO of Italian energy giant, the API Group. The
Brachetti Peretti family, like Francis Jardine’s former husband John Deuss, have
long been intimately involved in the global oil industry.

Another example of this “higher tier” of women within Epstein’s operation is
Melanie Walker. Walker, now a celebrated neurosurgeon, met Jeffrey Epstein in
1992 soon after she graduated from college, when he offered her a Victoria's Secret
modeling job. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, such offers were often made
by Epstein and his accomplices when recruiting women into his operation. It is
unclear if Walker ever actually worked as a model for the Leslie Wexner-owned
company.

She then stayed at a New York apartment building associated with Epstein’s
trafficking operations during visits to New York - the Ossa property-owned
apartments on 66" Street. However, it is unclear how long she stayed there or at
any other Epstein-owned properties. After she graduated from medical school in
1998, she became Epstein’s science adviser for at least a year. By 1999, she had
grown so close to Prince Andrew that she attended a Windsor Castle birthday
celebration hosted by the Queen alongside Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.12°
During this period, Melanie appears on Epstein’s flight logs under her birth name,
Melanie Starnes, though it looks like “Starves” on the flight logs 1%

The close relationship between Prince Andrew and Melanie Walker came
under scrutiny after Epstein’s former housekeeper at the Zorro Ranch property,
Deidre Stratton, stated in an interview that Prince Andrew had been “given” a
“beautiful young neurosurgeon” while he stayed at Epsteins New Mexico
property. Given that only one neurosurgeon was both close to Prince Andrew
and a part of Epstein’s entourage at the time, it seems highly likely that this woman
“given” to Andrew was Melanie Walker. According to Stratton, Andrew was “kept
company” by this woman for three days. The arrangement was set up by Epstein,
who was notably not at the property at the time. The exact timing of the stay is
uncertain, but it likely took place between 1999 and 2001.

Stratton said the following about the stay:

At the time, Jeffrey had this, she supposedly was a neurosurgeon, quite young, beautiful, young
and brilliant, and she stayed in the home with him.... At one point we had all these different
teas and you could pick the teas that you wanted and she asked me to find one that would make
Andrew more horny.

Tm guessing she understood her job was to entertain him because I guess, the fear, I don’t
know; the fear would be that Andrew would say, “No I didn’t really find her that attractive.” ...
He would tell Jeffrey that and then she would be on the ropes.

I'm guessing that, another theory is, that Jeffrey probably had her on retainer and she knew
what her job would be, should be, to make these people happy.... Sex was all they thought

109

about. I mean, I know for sure that Jeffrey would ideally like three massages a day. ~<

Sometime later, Walker moved to Seattle and began living with then Microsoft
executive Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a board partner at the venture
capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, Epstein and the Maxwells had
cultivated several significant ties to top Microsoft executives, including its two
founders — Bill Gates and Paul Allen (see chapter 20). Andreessen Horowitz
notably backs Carbyne911, the aforementioned Israel intelligence-linked
company funded by Epstein and his close associate Ehud Barak, and where Nicole
Junkermann served on its board. The firm also backs another Israeli intelligence-
linked tech company led by Barak, called Toka. Toka recently won contracts
with the governments of Moldova, Nigeria, and Ghana through the World Bank,
where Melanie Walker is currently a director and a former special adviser to its
president.2 It is unclear when, how, and under what circumstances Walker met
Sinofsky.

After moving to Seattle to be with Sinofsky and after a brief stint as a
“practitioner in the developing world” in China with the World Health
Organization, Walker was hired as a senior program officer by the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation in 2006. Epstein’s ties to Gates and Microsoft are discussed in
detail in chapter 20. During her time at the Gates Foundation, Walker introduced
Boris Nikolic, Gates’s science adviser, to Epstein.

Today, Melanie Walker is the co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global
Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, having previously been
named a WEF Young Global Leader. The ties of Leslie Wexner’s philanthropy, in
which Epstein was intimately involved, to the Young Global Leader program were
discussed in chapter 14. Walker also advises the World Health Organization,
which is closely linked to Bill Gates’ “philanthropy.”

In addition to the above, there are also the instances where former employees
and alleged co-conspirators of Epstein were either aided in their subsequent

careers, such as Nadia Marcinkova, or ended up marrying into the wealthier strata
of society, as in the cases of Sarah Kellen and Claire Hazell-Iveagh. In the case of
Hazell-Iveagh, she began dating her aristocrat husband at a time that overlapped
with the conclusion of her work for Epstein. Her husband has been accused of
being a notorious womanizer often seen in the company of other women,
suggesting that there may have been other motives behind their marriage. Their
divorce was announced in 2021.

It appears that women such as these, who had benefitted Epstein and his
operation considerably, as well as the women in whom he had invested heavily,
were part of another parallel sex trafficking operation of a different nature. As part
of this operation, the women were groomed, educated, and trained to, not be
exploitable “trash” to be abused by pervert elites, but to be the girlfriends and
wives of the elite and were apparently left with the impression that Epstein had
“helped” them advance their careers and advance into elite social circles.

Endnotes

NOAUA

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Jonathan Stempel, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sexual Abuses Began by 1985, Targeted 13-Year-Old,
Lawsuit Claims,’ Reuters, December 3, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-
jeffrey-epstein-lawsuit-idUSKBN1Y72K5.

Stempel, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sexual Abuses.”

Jon Swaine, Jon Henley, and Lucy Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel: Three Former Models Say They
Were Sexually Assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein Friend,” The Guardian, August 17, 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/17/jean-luc-brunel-jeffrey-epstein-
models-sexual-assault; “Jean-Luc Brunel: Epstein Associate Found Dead in Paris Prison Cell,”
BBC News, February 19, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-604435 18.
Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?’

Diane Sawyer, “American Girls in Paris,” 60 Minutes (CBS, December 23, 1988),
https://youtu.be/xwhQMLOZx0U,

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

Emily Shugerman, Kate Briquelet, and Lachlan Cartwright, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties
Go Much Deeper Than Victoria's Secret,’ The Daily Beast, September 7, 2019,

deeper-than-victorias-secret.

Bradley J Edwards, Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, ePub (Simon
and Schuster, 2020), 109.

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”
Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”
Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”
Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”
Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”
Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”

Sarah Marks, “New York Branch of Elite is sold for £4.4m,’ Evening Standard, August 25, 2004,
Section D, p. 33.

Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”
Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?’

Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.”
Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

Reuters and Chris Pleasance, “Jeffrey Epstein: Three ‘victims’ Have Come Forward in Paris,’
Mail Online, September 11, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-745 1645/Jeffrey-
Epstein-Three-victims-say-abused-come-forward-Paris.html.

Reuters and Pleasance, “Jeffrey Epstein: Three ‘victims’ Have Come Forward.”

Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel?”

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Virginia Heffernan, “The Twisted Flight Paths of ‘Global Girl’ and the Lolita Express,” Wired,
July 23, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/global-girl-jeffrey-epstein-and-the-lolita-
express/.

Janet Winikoff, “Nada Marcinkova: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,’ Heavy.com, August 12,
2019, https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/nada-marcinkova/.

Chris Spargo, “Messages for Jeffrey Epstein Suggest Sexual Abuse of Girl, 8, Mail Online, July

procuring-two-8-year-old-girls-pedophile-sexually-abuse.html.

Chris Spargo, “Jeffrey Epstein Had Photos of His Naked Underage Victims in Home,’ Mail
photos-naked-underage-victims-displayed-Palm-Beach-home.html.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls’: The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell,”
ghislaine-maxwell-epstein-enabler.

“Jean-Luc Brunel: Epstein Associate Found Dead in Paris Prison Cell,” BBC News, February 19,
2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60443518.

Laura Stampler, “These Modern Ads Are Even More Sexist Than Their ‘Mad Men’ Era
Counterparts,’ Business Insider, April 10, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/these-
modern-ads-are-even-more-sexist-than-their-mad-men-era-counterparts-2012-4; Adweek
Blogs, “Italy Gives the Finger to Latest Tom Ford Ad,” Adweek, April 25, 2008,
https://www.adweek.com/creativity/italy-gives-finger-latest-tom-ford-ad-15947/.

Megan C. Hills, “Fashion Editor Richard Buckley, Husband of Tom Ford, Dies at 72,” CNN,
September 21, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/richard-buckley-tom-ford-husband-
death/index.html.

Jason Guerrasio, “Heidi Klum Demanded to Wear the Biggest Wings out of All the Victoria’s
Secret Models for the Fashion Shows, a New Docuseries about the Brand Reveals,’ Insider,
July 13, 2022, https://www.insider.com/heidi-klum-biggest-wings-victorias-secret-fashion-
shows-do-cuseries-hulu-2022-7.

Dan Alexander, “Victoria's Other Secret: The Low-Key Billionaire Behind The Lingerie Giant,’
Forbes, September 30, 2014,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2014/09/30/victorias-other-secret-the-low-
key-billionaire-behind-the-lingerie-giant/.

Alexander, “Victoria's Other Secret.”

Mary Hanbury, “Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Tried to Meddle in Selecting Victoria's Secret
Models, and Now the Firm Is Investigating,” Business Insider, July 25, 2019,

connection-2019-7; Katy Docherty, “How a Toxic Trio at Victoria's Secret Made Life Hell for
Lingerie Models,’ The Sun, February 4, 2020,
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10885341/victorias-secret-toxic-trio-bullying/.

Isabel Vincent, “Inside the Victoria's Secret Pipeline to Jeffrey Epstein,” New York Post, July 14,

epstein/.

Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, “ Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.’
Shugerman, Briquelet, and Cartwright, “ Jeffrey Epstein’s Modeling Ties Go Much Deeper.’
Vincent, “Inside the Victoria's Secret Pipeline.’

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Vincent, “Inside the Victoria's Secret Pipeline”

Vincent, “Inside the Victoria's Secret Pipeline”

Charles Trepany, “Victoria's Secret Hulu Doc Explores Jeffrey Epstein, Les Wexner Ties: The
Biggest Revelations,’ USA TODAY, July 15, 2022,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/07/14/victorias-secret-hulu-doc-
Caroline Graham, “Ghislaine Maxwell Trawled Galleries for Girls to Meet Jeffrey Epstein,’ Mail
Online, August 9, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8608267/Ghislaine-
Maxwell-trawled-galleries-gallerinas-meet-Jeffrey-Epstein-claims-former-friend.html.
Graham, “Ghislaine Maxwell Trawled Galleries.’

Graham, “Ghislaine Maxwell Trawled Galleries.’

Elizabeth Hayt, “Bringing the Party to Sotheby’s,” New York Times, September 26, 1999,

lodge-at-interlochens-prestigious-arts-camp-for-kids-in-michigan.

Selvin, “Epstein’s Art World Connections.’

Selvin, “Epstein’s Art World Connections.’

Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge.’

Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge.’

Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge.”

Ariel Zilber, Jeffrey Epstein ‘befriended’ First Victim, 13, at Michigan Arts Camp,’ Mail Online,

befriended-victim-13-Michigan-arts-camp-book-claims.html.

Ben Feuerherd and Tamar Lapin, “Just Turned into This Orgy’: First Accuser Testifies at
Ghislaine Maxwell Trial,’ New York Post, November 30, 2021,

ghislaine-maxwell-trial/.

Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge.”

Zilber, “Jeffrey Epstein ‘befriended’ First Victim.’

Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge.”

Priscilla DeGregory, “Jeffrey Epstein Victim Says He Sexually Abused Her for 15 Years: Suit,’

he-abused-her-for-15-years-suit/.

Kate Briquelet, “I Told Him | Was Only 15’: Epstein Victim Weeps As She Recounts Orgies
epstein-and-ghislaine-maxwell-abused-14-year-old-and-sent-her-victorias-secret-lingerie-
court-hears.

Julia Reinstein, “23 Women Stood In Court And Said Jeffrey Epstein Abused Them. Here Are
Their Most Powerful Quotes,’ BuzzFeed News, August 27, 2019,

testify-court-quotes.

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Reinstein, “23 Women Stood In Court And Said Jeffrey Epstein Abused Them.’

Amy Julia Harris, Frances Robles, Mike Baker and William K. Rashbaum, “How a Ring of

Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein,” New York Times, August 29, 2019,

Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”
Andrew Marra, “The Man Who Had Everything: Jeffrey Epstein Craved Big Homes, Elite
Friends and Underage Girls,’ Palm Beach Post, August 14, 2006,

recruiter-haley-robson-he-paid-the-teen-lure-girls/.

Chris Spargo, “I’m like Heidi Fleiss’: Epstein ‘pimp’ Haley Robson ‘Bragged about Providing
Pedophile with Girls and Was Set to Be Charged by Police - despite Being in High School and
a Victim Herself?” Mail Online, July 29, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

charged.html.
Reinstein, “23 Women Stood In Court And Said Jeffrey Epstein Abused Them.’
Kate Briquelet, “Epstein Victim Had to Dress in Schoolgirl Outfit to Serve Him Tea,’ The Daily

ghislaine-maxwell-made-her-dress-in-schoolgirl-outfit-to-serve-him-tea.

Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls.”

Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls.”

Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”
Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”

Danya Hajjaji and Jack Royston, “Ghislaine Maxwell's ‘Grooming’ Explained by a Forensic
Psychologist,’ Newsweek, December 22, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/ghislaine-
maxwells-grooming-behavior-explained-forensic-psychologist-1662100; Victoria Bekiempis,
“Ghislaine Maxwell Trained Underage Girls as Sex Slaves, Documents Allege,” The Guardian,
July 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/31/ghislaine-maxwell-

Grigoriadis, “They're Nothing, These Girls.”
Sarah Ransome, “I Survived Epstein and Maxwell’s Sex Ring. Then the Gaslighting Be-gan,’

Reports indicate that the 66th Street apartments owned by Ossa Properties housed women
associated with Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, many of whom were from Eastern Europe
and South America. Epstein is also alleged to have “purchased” Nadia Marcinkova from her
family in Eastern Europe. His activities in Southeast Asia are known because Virgina Giuffre
traveled to Thailand at Epstein’s behest “to pick up a young girl, interview her, and let
Epstein know if she was ‘qualified’ See: The Mail on Sunday, “Virginia Roberts Fled Epstein
after Being Asked to Have Surrogate,” Mail Online, March 21, 2020,

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Maxwell-asked-surrogate-baby.html.

Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”
Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”
Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”

Ben Ashford, “Parents of Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘lieutenant’ Fear She Will Be Charged,’ Mail
Online, July 17, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8510925/Parents-Ghislaine-
Maxwells-lieutenant-fear-charged-Epsteins-sex-ring.html.

Ashford, “Parents of Ghislaine Maxwell's ‘lieutenant’”

Ashford, “Parents of Ghislaine Maxwell's ‘lieutenant
Ben Ashford, “Epstein ‘scheduler’ Adriana Ross Dodges Questions about His Sick Past,’ Mail
Online, August 16, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7361001/Epstein-
scheduler-Adriana-Ross-dodges-questions-sick-past-fleeing-Florida-church.html.

Harris, Robles, Baker, and Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls.”
Jacob Shamsian, “Prosecutors Won't Charge Jeffrey Epstein’s Former Assistant Lesley Groff,
Who Accusers Say Booked ‘massage’ Appointments and Flights, Her Lawyers Say,” Insider,

m

associate-lesley-groff-lawyers-say-2021-12.

Shamsian, “Prosecutors Won't Charge Jeffrey Epstein’s Former Assistant Lesley Groff.”
Landon Thomas Jr, “Working for Top Bosses on Wall St. Has Its Perks,’ New York Times,

on-wall-st-has-its-perks.html.
Thomas, “Working for Top Bosses on Wall St.’
Kate Briquelet and Lachlan Cartwright, “Epstein’s ‘Madam’ Is Behind Bars. Is Prince Andrew

madam-ghislaine-maxwell-is-behind-bars-is-prince-andrew-next.
Natalie Musumeci, “Investigators Eye Guinness Beer Aristocrat amid Ghislaine Maxwell’s

guinness-beer-aristocrat-amid-ghislaine-maxwells-arrest/.

Tim Stickings, “Epstein Investigators ‘want to Talk to’ Guinness Family Aristocrat,” Mail
Online, July 3, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8487581/Epstein-
investigators-want-talk-Guinness-family-aristocrat.html.

Stickings, “Epstein Investigators.’

Daniel Bates, “Jeffrey Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him to the Clinton White House,’ Mail
Online, January 13, 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10394863/Jeffrey-
Epstein-brought-eight-women-Clinton-White-House.html.

Bates, “Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him”

Bates, “Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him.’

HashTigre, Twitter post, June 15, 2022,
https://twitter.com/hash_tigre/status/1537250800581283840.

Bates, “Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him.’

Bates, “Epstein Brought 8 Women with Him”

Whitney Webb, “Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon,” Unlimited
Hangout, December 7, 2020, https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/12/investigative-

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Whitney Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings,’
MintPress News, September 6, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-
jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/.

“The Rockefeller Foundation Announces Inaugural Cohort of Fellows,’ The Rockefeller
Foundation, January 8, 2018, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/rockefeller-
foundation-announces-inaugural-cohort-fellows/.

James Beal, Dan Wootton, and Hugo Daniel, “Prince Andrew Close to Brain Surgeon Who
Worked for Paedo Pal Epstein,’ The Sun, March 27, 2020,

epstein/.
“Flight Manifests Page 65,’ EpsteinsBlackBook.com,

pid=91489007.

Tom Sykes, “Prince Andrew Was ‘Given’ ‘Beautiful Young Neurosurgeon’ by Epstein, Says Ex-
Housekeeper,’ The Daily Beast, November 22, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/prince-
Sykes, “Prince Andrew Was ‘Given’ ‘Beautiful Young Neurosurgeon’

“Team,” Andreessen Horowitz, https://a16z.com/about/team/.

Kate Clark, “Former Israeli Prime Minister Helps Launch A16z-Backed Cyber Defense
Startup,’ PitchBook, July 16, 2018, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/former-israeli-prime-
minister-helps-launch-a16z-backed-cyber-defense-startup.

walker/,

Richard Eden, “Countess of Iveagh, 46, Splits from £900m Guinness Heir,’ Mail Online,
February 27, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9306473/Countess-lveagh-
splits-Guinness-heir-one-Britains-biggest-divorces.html.

Re ppm
"TF EPRA ge es

Prince Andrew

CHAPTER 19

THE PRINCE AND THE PRESIDENT

“RANDY ANDY”

A discussed in the previous chapter, Epstein and Maxwell recruited, groomed,

and trafficked countless women, teens, and girls, often luring them in with
promises of glamorous modeling careers or other forms of “help.” These girls were
seemingly divided into tiers, with some being treated as easily exploitable and
expendable and others being treated as more elite and worthy of increased
investment. One of Epsteins most well-known targets in terms of sexual
blackmail, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, would become associated with both.

It’s unclear exactly when Epstein met Prince Andrew. As noted in chapter 11,
Epstein’s connection to the British Royal family allegedly began as far back as the
1970s and was forged through Epstein’s ties to violinist Jacqueline du Pré.
Ghislaine Maxwell, however, is widely believed to be the person who introduced
Epstein to Prince Andrew and her social connections to the British nobility from a
young age saw her socializing with members of the Royal family at least as early as
the mid-1980s, if not before. Several media reports from the early 2000s claim that
Maxwell was introduced to the Prince by his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. Years after
this introduction was reportedly made, Jeffrey Epstein provided financial
assistance to Ferguson at Prince Andrew's behest by paying Ferguson's former
personal assistant £15,000, allegedly in order to allow for “a wider restructuring of
Sarah’s £5 million debts to take place,’ according to The Telegraph?

Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner and financial schemer
(see chapter 11), has claimed that Epstein bragged of his relationship with Prince
Andrew in the early 1990s and that he had met the Prince via Maxwell around
1991 in the United Kingdom.* Hoffenberg has claimed that Epstein’s relationship
with Andrew was one of his earliest “blackmail plots” and that Epstein openly
boasted of plans to sell the prince’s secrets to Israeli intelligence.* Epstein also
reportedly referred to Andrew as his “superbowl trophy.” Prince Andrew has since
claimed that he didn’t meet Epstein until 1999 and has sought to downplay the
extent of their relationship.

However, well before Epstein was infamous, there are numerous indications
that Andrew’s relationship with him was very close as well as very abnormal. The
Epstein-Prince Andrew relationship has long been a fascination of the UK press,
even before Epstein’s notoriety, with numerous articles from the early 2000s

detailing the most outrageous aspects of their relationship. Prior to his association
with the Prince, Epstein had also garnered attention from UK newspapers
regarding his association with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose reputation in the UK has
long been notorious due to the legacy left by her father, Robert Maxwell.

Reports from the UK between 2000 and 2001 on the Epstein-Prince Andrew
relationship are rather revealing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of them were
apparently scrubbed from the internet around the time of Epstein’s first arrest and
subsequent conviction. These reports not only reference Epstein’s connection to
both US and Israeli intelligence years before the first investigation into Epstein’s
exploitation of minors began, but also reveal surprising aspects of Prince Andrew's
involvement with Epstein that strongly suggest that the Prince partook in illicit
sexual activities with minors to a much greater extent than has previously been
reported.

The public, close relationship between Prince Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell,
and Jeffrey Epstein began in February 2000, around the time the Prince turned 40
years old. That month he took a vacation at the Trump-owned Mar-a-Lago club in
Palm Beach with Ghislaine Maxwell and subsequently traveled with her to New
York. Andrew, in New York, reportedly stayed at Epstein’s residence.

Regarding this New York trip, the Daily Mail reported the following in
February 2000:

For almost a week Andrew had been a guest of “A” list party girl Ghislaine at the Manhattan
apartment on the smart Upper East Side she shares with New York property developer Jeffrey
Epstein, 50. While in New York, Ghislaine took Andrew to a fashion show, at the headquarters
of designer Ralph Lauren. The Prince even went backstage afterwards and chatted with the
models. He looked remarkably comfortable among the willowy creatures, especially as the once-
portly Prince — privately known among Buckingham Palace staff as “three puddings” — has shed

some weight ©

Given the relationship that Maxwell and Epstein had to the modeling
industry, it is quite possible that Andrew being given access to attractive models at
a fashion show by Maxwell was used to entice and tempt the Prince, drawing him
deeper into their social circle. Indeed, shortly after this particular visit, Andrew's
relationship with Maxwell and Epstein grew considerably.

The next month, in March, Andrew accompanied Ghislaine to a fundraising
dinner in New York for the London Symphony Orchestra. Shortly thereafter, in
April 2000, the Daily Mail again reported that Maxwell and the Prince had met up
for a “romantic lunch.” The article states that, since his 40" birthday in February,

the Prince has been linked “to a series of stunning companions.” It adds that, of
those companions, “none, surely, is more intriguing than Ghislaine Maxwell,
daughter of the disgraced newspaper tycoon, with whom, it is claimed yesterday,
Andrew held hands over lunch in a fashionable New York restaurant.”® The pair
were seen “[holding] hands as they toyed with lobster salad and champagne
cocktails. They left separately only to play cat and mouse with photographers.”

The conduct between Maxwell and Andrew was described as odd, in part,
because Andrew was then dating a friend of Maxwell's, Australian-born PR
executive Emma Gibbs. Friends interviewed by the Daily Mail asserted that the
relationship between Maxwell and Andrew was “strictly platonic” and they were
just “good friends.” However, a separate report from 2007 in the Evening Standard
refers to Maxwell as one of Prince Andrew’s former girlfriends.”

This type of behavior seems to be a key part of Maxwell’s manipulative tactics.
While she was also an expert at manipulating young, vulnerable women and girls,
Maxwell was also talented at manipulating men, which she often did to benefit
herself and Epstein (and before Epstein, her father). This is attested to in yet
another article from the period, published in November 2000 by the Sunday
Times, which quoted friends as saying “The reason she [Maxwell] has men eating
out of her hand is she manages to make them feel sexy and fascinating. She’s an
outrageous flirt and fascinated by dodgy, powerful men. It’s all part of her Electra
complex.”!2 This type of flirtatious, quasi-romantic behavior on Maxwell’s part
appears to have been behavior she readily engaged in with, not only Prince
Andrew, but another of Epstein’s main “targets” during this time - Bill Clinton
(discussed later in this chapter).

It is also entirely possible that Maxwell had helped arrange Andrew's then-
relationship with her friend Emma Gibbs and that this was another means of
making Andrew more dependent on Maxwell to arrange (and thus control) his
social life. Indeed, she would soon become known as Andrew’s “social fixer” and
she was also described as fulfilling that same role for Jeffrey Epstein. +

Ghislaine Maxwell, over the years, appears to have used a range of her
“girlfriends” to infiltrate, manipulate, and control powerful men, and those men
may have been content to be coerced in such a way. It seems that this was also the
likely motive for Maxwell’s and Epstein’s arranging of relationships between the
“elite” tier of girls and women they recruited who later became the girlfriends and
wives of powerful, elite men in their broader social networks (see the previous

chapter). Returning to the case of Prince Andrew, before his increased
involvement with Epstein and Maxwell, he already had some significant
relationships with socialites before his marriage in 1986 to Sarah Ferguson that,
notably, had some connection to Epstein.

In 1981, for example, he dated Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg -
daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia — followed by a two year relationship
with New York-based actress Koo Stark.2 After his marriage to Ferguson fell apart
in 1996, Andrew seemingly took some years off before he paired up with Caroline
Stanbury. She dated Prince Andrew in 2000, with The Sun later reporting in 2017
that the Prince “even took her to a Martha’s Vineyard Gala with Bill and Hillary
Clinton, but the pair split due to the continued press attention on their
relationship.” Stanbury has also been previously been reported to have dated
actors Hugh Grant and Sylvester Stallone, among others.

Both Koo Stark and Caroline Stanbury appear in Epstein’s little black book of
contacts with Catherine Oxenberg’s sister, Christina, also being listed. In 2001,
Andrew was again dating a member of the Epstein-Maxell social circle, Emma
Gibbs. Later on, in 2006 and 2007, the Prince dated Angie Everhart, who is also
listed in Epstein’s book of contacts. Another name linked with Prince Andrew can
also be found in Epstein’s book of associates, his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.

A month after their “romantic” lunch, in May, Andrew made an “official trip”
to New York and subsequently went on vacation with Ghislaine in Florida. Next,
in June, Ghislaine and Epstein attended a celebration for the Queen's birthday at
Windsor Castle. After a few months, in September, Maxwell and Andrew attended
the wedding of Andrew’s ex-girlfriend Aurelia Cecil together. The following
month, in October, Andrew again made an “official” visit to New York where he
partied with Ghislaine Maxwell. In December, Andrew helped arrange a weekend
house party “in honour” of Maxwell’s 39" birthday in the UK.4

The next year, in January 2001, a very telling article penned by Nigel Rosser
was published in the UK’s Evening Standard.* By that point, Prince Andrew —
between February 2000 and January 2001 — had eight recorded outings and trips
with Maxwell, five of which had also involved Epstein. The report claimed that
Andrew, for the past year, had been spending more time with Maxwell than his
own children. This article, in addition to a November 2000 piece in the Sunday
Times, mentions allegations that Epstein was rumored to be afhliated with
intelligence and both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad are mentioned1® Such

allegations, as previously mentioned elsewhere in this book, were reported in
British media as early as 1992.44

Rosser’s report also quoted several personal friends of Maxwell and Epstein,
who provided telling insights into the pair’s relationship with the Prince. For
instance, one friend was quoted as saying that Maxwell “is able to entrance anyone
she chooses and Epstein can pay for anything anyone wants. She is very
manipulative, and winds people round her little finger. The whole Andrew thing is
probably being done for Epstein.”1®

Another friend of the pair similarly told Rosser that “Ghislaine is
manipulating him [Prince Andrew] and he’s too naive to realise it. She’s his social
fixer and he’s going along with it - why? Because I think Epstein’s fantastically
impressed by it all. It’s all very premeditated.”

Rosser’s 2001 article in the Evening Standard further describes Epstein and
Prince Andrew as having a “curious symbiotic relationship,’ adding that “wherever
Ghislaine is seen with Prince Andrew, Epstein isn’t far behind.”

These quotes are particularly revealing now that it is widely acknowledged,
over a decade after this article was published, that Epstein was seeking out rich
and powerful individuals and entrapping them with minors for the purpose of
blackmail. The fact that personal friends of Epstein and Maxwell at the time
openly stated that their “manipulative” relationship with Prince Andrew was “very
premeditated” and “probably being done for Epstein” strongly suggests that not
only was the Prince entrapped, but that this entrapment activity was known to
those who were close to Epstein and Maxwell at the time (and presumably British
intelligence and other intelligence agencies). The quotes also speak to Maxwell’s
“manipulative” behavior, which she used to groom not only young, vulnerable
girls (as noted in the last chapter), but also targets for sexual blackmail, like Prince
Andrew.

Prince Andrew — as a member of the Royal Family, which is very protective of
its social reputation — certainly fits into the category of people that Epstein sought
to entrap on behalf of intelligence: rich, politically powerful, wary of damaging
their social reputation, and thus susceptible to blackmail.

Notably, the year this article was published in the Evening Standard (i.e. 2001),
is the same year that Epstein’s most well-known accuser and victim, Virginia
Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts), claims that she was introduced to Prince Andrew
by Maxwell and Epstein and forced to have sex with the Prince on at least three

occasions. She has also claimed that Epstein would subsequently instruct her to
describe to him the encounters in order to learn compromising information about
the Princes sexual habits and preferences. Her claims regarding Epstein’s
trafficking of her, specifically to Prince Andrew, have since been largely
corroborated by photographic evidence, flight logs, and public records.”2

Perhaps the best corroboration of Giuffre’s allegations is that fact that, in
2022, Prince Andrew decided to pay Giuffre a reported sum of $20 million as part
of an out-of-court settlement in order to avoid having to face her in court or to
give any statement about the past encounters between them under oath.
Giuffre’s lawsuit had alleged that the Prince had sexually abused her at Epstein’s
island, Epstein’s New York mansion, and at a residence of Ghislaine Maxwell's in
London. It also alleged that Andrew knew she was underage at the time of the
encounters.”

While it appears that Prince Andrew was deliberately entrapped as part of
Epstein’s intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operation, Rosser’s article further
suggests that Andrew's involvement with the minors and young women exploited
by Epstein went far beyond his alleged three encounters with Giuffre. For
instance, Rosser quotes a friend of Prince Andrew’s ex-wife Sara Ferguson as
saying that Andrew “used to be smart when he came back from abroad.... He's
started having a girl massage him... He even travels abroad with his own massage
mattress.”

During this same time period, Epstein and Maxwell also introduced Prince
Andrew to “sex aid entrepreneur” Christine Drangsholt during a trip to Mar-a-
Lago and describes Andrew traveling to Los Angeles, where he was seen “flirting

. with a group of young girls,” and to Phuket, Thailand, where he “wandered
around the sex bars in the area's red light district”? The Los Angeles trip saw
Andrew accompanied by artist and close friend of Michael Jackson, Brett
Livingstone Strong. Ghislaine Maxwell had also accompanied Andrew to
Thailand, the same country to which Epstein later sent Virginia Giuffre to recruit
others into his international sex trafficking operation.

The mentions of “massages” from a “girl” and Andrew traveling around with
Maxwell and Epstein while bringing along “his own massage mattress,” are
particularly striking given what is now known about Epstein’s sex trafficking and
sexual blackmail operation. Court documents, police reports, and other evidence
have since made it clear that “massage” was the code word Epstein and his co-

conspirators used for sex with the minors he exploited and massage tables and sex
toys were frequently present together in the rooms of his various residences where
he forced underage girls to engage in sexual acts with him and others.”

Most notable of all is the fact that these claims of Prince Andrew receiving
“massages” from girls during his trips with Epstein and Maxwell were published in
January 2001, at least two months before Virginia Giuffre states that she was first
introduced to and forced to have sex with the Prince in March 2001. This means
that the claims in Rosser’s article regarding Epstein-and Maxwell-brokered
“massages” refer to at least one other girl, strongly suggesting that Andrew’s
involvement with minors ex-ploited by Epstein is much greater than what has
been publicly acknowledged. Also somewhere in this same timeframe, between
1999 and 2001, Andrew was a guest of Epstein’s at Zorro Ranch, where he was
“given” a “beautiful young neurosurgeon” believed to be Melanie Walker
(discussed in the previous chapter).

Over the past few years, other reports have added to the likelihood that Prince
Andrew engaged in illicit activities with more minors than Virginia Giuffre. For
instance, in September 2019, the FBI expanded its probe into Epstein’s sex
trafficking network to include a specific focus on the Prince’s role.” The FBI then
stated that they were reviewing claims regarding Prince Andrew made by other
Epstein victims aside from Giuffre, but did not specify the nature of those claims.

It is worth examining why Epstein and Maxwell were interested in associating
so closely with Prince Andrew and enticing him to partake in their illicit activities
at this point in time. One possible motive may lie in gaining access to certain
“philanthropies,’ as the British Royal family are active patrons of various children’s
charities. As will be discussed later in this chapter, access to powerful
“philanthropies” appears to be one of the reasons for Epstein’s increasingly public
association with Bill Clinton during this same period.

For instance, while Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell were reportedly
partying in New York during April 2000, Prince Andrew also attended a Patron’s
Company Lunch for the Outward Bound Trust as a trustee on 14 April 2000 at
Buckingham Palace.” This may have also been attractive to sex traffickers like
Epstein and Maxwell, as the Outward Bound Trust is an educational charity
which “takes more than 25,000 young people each year, many from deprived
areas, to climb mountains, sleep under the stars, and brave the elements in the
wild places of the UK”? The Duke of York only stepped down from his position

as trustee of the Outward Bound Trust in 2019, and was eventually replaced by his
daughter, Princess Beatrice.2® There has never been any official investigation into
Andrew's time at the children’s charity.

Another reason Epstein may have promoted his increasingly public
association with Andrew during this time may be related to Andrew's other roles
during this period. Beginning in 2001, the Duke of York worked with UK Trade
and Investment which was part of the Department for Business, Innovation and
Skills. The Duke was then acting as the United Kingdom’s Special Representative
for International Trade and Investment. This position had previously been
occupied by the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Edward, and the
organization was formerly referred to as the “British Overseas Trade Board.”

In this official position, Andrew began doing business with executives from
some of the world’s most powerful companies as well as major politicians in both
the UK and abroad. In this position, Prince Andrew traveled throughout the
United Kingdom and the wider world. For instance, in 2004 alone, Prince
Andrew undertook “around 300 UKTI engagements including 148 calls or visits
in the UK and 152 overseas”3? Notably, during this time, Andrew’s relationship
with Epstein and Maxwell was at its peak, meaning that the pair would likely have
been able to influence Andrew’s behavior on these trade missions were it in their
interest to do so.

Significantly, Andrew’s role at UKTI saw him accused of “open|[ing] doors to
arms dealers,” specifically in Indonesia, a country where the Riady family (see
chapters 8, 16 and 17) are a dominant force. Andrew was also accused on this
and other occasions of seeking to facilitate business deals that specifically
benefitted British weapons dealer BAE Systems. As noted in chapter 11,
Epstein’s British mentor, Sir Douglas Leese, had been associated with a massive
BAE weapons deal to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Epstein’s close relationship with
Prince Andrew at this time and his own history with weapons companies and
arms smugglers suggests that Andrew's relationship with Epstein could have been
a factor in the Princes promotion and facilitation of arms deals to specific
countries during this period.

Another possible reason as to why Maxwell and Epstein targeted Prince
Andrew was because of the protection from prosecution that an association with
the British royal family can provide. While only the Queen herself has official
immunity from prosecution, aside from police warnings for speeding violations

given to Princess Anne on a few occasions, the only previous occasion where a
member of the British royal family was prosecuted for crimes was King Charles I
during the English Civil War of the 1600s.

Even though members of the royal family are not officially exempt from
prosecution, the UK police rarely act when the royals are accused of crimes. For
example, Prince Charles has had some very suspicious associations, such as to the
infamous BBC star and pedophile, Jimmy Savile, and various members of the
clergy who have been convicted of sex acts against children — such as the former-
Church of England Bishop, Peter Ball, who served only 16 months in prison for
offenses against 18 young men. Yet, Charles's association with active pedophiles,
much like Andrew’s relationship with Epstein — a foreign intelligence asset — have
never been properly investigated by the UK police.

EPSTEIN, CLINTON, AND PHILANTHROPY 2.0

Avr the same time that Epstein and Maxwell were growing closer to Prince

‘Andrew and “arranging his social life,’ they also began to publicly cozy up to
another man of influence — Bill Clinton. Indeed, shortly after Bill Clinton left
office, his relationship with Epstein and Maxwell deepened considerably. It has
also been the erroneous contention of the mainstream media that Clinton's
relationship with Epstein only began during this period of time, in his post-
presidency. This is likely part of a broader effort to obfuscate Epstein’s relationship
with the Clinton White House in the 1990s (see chapters 16 and 17).

By 2002, Clinton was being referred to in media reports as Epstein’s “latest
prized addition” The article also quoted Clinton via a spokesman as saying the
following of Epstein: “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed
philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of
twenty-first-century science.” Clinton also said at the time that he “especially
appreciated his [Epstein’s] insights and generosity” as it related to “work on
democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating
HIV/AIDS.”

In the months after leaving the White House, Bill Clinton not only began to
spend a lot more time (at least publicly) with Jeffrey Epstein, he was also focused
on the launching of his “philanthropic” organization, the Clinton Foundation. In
examining the Epstein-Clinton relationship in the early 2000s, there are numerous
indications that Epstein — the man who previously had “masterminded” one of the
largest Ponzi schemes in US history via Towers Financial and whose past financial
activity was interwoven with organized crime and intelligence networks — played a
key role in shaping Clintons post-presidential philanthropy. It is also worth
keeping in mind that Epstein’s past associations with the Clinton White House
revolved around controversial fundraisers with links to foreign espionage
operations.

Epstein was also involved in the philanthropy of Bill Gates, which will be
discussed more in the next chapter. The philanthropies of Gates and Clinton, both
launched in 2001, were intertwined in key ways, with Epstein being one major, yet
underreported connection between the two.

Epstein’s role in shaping these high-profile philanthropies was no accident.
During the early 2000s, there were major shifts in the world of philanthropy
underway where people in Epstein’s broader network — like convicted felon and
former “junk bond king” Michael Milken and tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates —
were developing what some have called “philanthropy 2.0.”

Much of this new model of “philanthropy” has centered around securing
“pledges” from billionaires, multi-millionaires, and wealthy celebrities that are
ultimately “multi-year promises to invest time and money” in businesses in
particular markets which are framed as having a high “social impact.’ These
“pledges” receive a lot of publicity and are publicly treated as “philanthropic.”
However, critics and even supporters have noted that this is “not philanthropy -
not as the U.S. Tax Code defines it, or really, how popular culture has always
considered it since the earliest societies adopted alms giving to the poor.”

Key aspects of so-called “philanthropy 2.0” are related to the rise of “venture
philanthropy,” which is defined as “the application or redirection of principles of
traditional venture capital financing to achieve philanthropic endeavors”? Such
“philanthropic endeavors” are further defined as “making investments that
promote some sort of social good, like socially responsible investments (SRI) to
meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria” as opposed to turning
a profit. However, if the “venture philanthropist” is also on the board of the
company and holds stock in the company benefitting from the “philanthropy” (as
often happens), there are ultimately few tangible differences between venture
capitalism and “venture philanthropy.’ It should come as no surprise, then, that
“philanthropists” of this mold often refer their “philanthropic” donations as
investments and openly tout the high return on investment those “donations”
have generated.*8

The Clinton Foundation is a notable example of such “philanthropy.” It has
also been routinely accused of functioning as a more sophisticated version of the
corrupt, “pay-to-play” political slush funds used by the Clintons in the past. Yet,
instead of their past use of formal political fundraising bodies for these purposes,
this time they used what is nominally a “charity.”22 When considering that
Epstein’s earliest involvement with the Clintons was related to their most
questionable fundraising activities (see chapter 16), as well as Epstein’s own past
of financial crimes, this suggests that his role in guiding the early days of the
Clinton's “philanthropic” ventures was hardly coincidental and also suggests there

were ulterior motives behind the foundation’s creation. Notably, one of the
participants in the suspect 1996 fundraising meetings discussed in chapter 16,
Bruce Lindsey, was one of the earliest heads of the Clinton Foundation.

Epstein’s covert role in the early days of the Clinton Foundation can be seen in
key ways. The foundation, for instance, was created by Bill Clinton alongside
Doug Band with input from people like Ira Magaziner, among others, in 2001.
Notably, Epstein’s several flights with Clinton during this period often saw Band
onboard and, on a few occasions, Ira Magaziner as well.42 Another person on
flights on Epstein’s plane with Clinton, Band, and/or Magaziner is Gayle Smith, a
former advisor to Clinton who later became the Working Group Chair on Global
Poverty for the Clinton Global Initiative from 2005 to 2007.44

In addition, Epstein’s defense lawyers during his first arrest for sex crimes
claimed that “Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton
Global Initiative [CGI], which is described as a project “bringing together a
community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to
some of the world’s most pressing challenges.”42 Others have described the CGI
as “a kind of dressed-up Woodstock for corporate generals and NGO dreamers”
and as the Clinton Foundation’s “glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads
of state, and celebrities” *2

Epstein’s plane being shared by Clinton, Band, Magaziner, Smith, and others
during this critical period where Clinton's post-presidential philanthropies were
being designed and established corroborates the claim from his lawyers that
Epstein was part of this particular group. This is especially true when considering
the destinations and purposes of many of those specific flights.

The flights Clinton took on Epstein’s plane began in February 2002 and
involved 6 unique trips, which involved 26 flights overall, between 2002 and 2003.
On February 9, 2002, Clinton was recorded as flying on Epstein’s plane from
Miami International Airport to Westchester County, New York, where he lives.
On that occasion, the flight logs record that there were three Secret Service agents
accompanying the former-President.

Clinton again appears on Epstein’s flight manifest accompanied by a sizable
Secret Service detail, with flight logs recording that on March 19, 2002, Clinton
and Epstein flew from JFK to London Luton airport along with three members of
the Secret Service, Doug Band, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sarah Kellen. The group
returned to JFK on March 21, accompanied by an additional seven members of

the Secret Service, supermodel Naomi Campbell, and one unidentified male
passenger. Though little is known about the purpose of these earliest flights,
Clinton's subsequent trips on Epstein’s plane were intimately linked to Clinton's
efforts to develop his “philanthropies.”

On May 22, 2002, Bill Clinton was again recorded on the flight logs for
Epsein’s plane, but on this occasion, without his Secret Service detail. Before they
made their eventual rendezvous with Clinton in Japan, Epstein, Maxwell, and
Kellen had arrived via Nice, France, and Novosibirsk in Russia.

Clinton had already been in Asia since at least May 19, when he was acting as
then-president George W. Bush's official emissary and led an official delegation to
East Timor from May 19 to May 20.“ The next day, Clinton was in Japan to
receive an honorary law doctorate, which was presented to him by the president of
Nihon University, Yukiyasu Sezaki.*® The following day, Clinton boarded Epstein’s
plane and the group took off from Japan's Atsugi Naval Air Facility and traveled to
Hong Kong.

Aboard this flight were Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sarah Kellen, Bill
Clinton, Pete Rathgeb (a Florida-based pilot), and Doug Band. They were
accompanied by two girls only referred to as Janice and Jessica in the flight logs,
believed by some to be trafficked women, and someone identified by the letters
“MCXG” and a note of “+6 pax.’ The latter annotation appears to refer to 6
additional passengers, whose identities are unknown, joining that particular flight.
Epstein’s plane had originally arrived on the Japanese naval base on 20 May, two
days prior to their departure to Hong Kong.

Epstein’s plane briefly stopped in Hong Kong before flying on to China, where
it landed at Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport in the Guangdong province of
China, on May 23, 2002. There, the group only stayed for a few hours. The group
then flew from China and landed at Singapore's joint civilian-naval base, Changi
Air Base.

The trip to Singapore is significant as Epstein and Maxwell were
photographed at the Fullerton Hotel attending a dinner meeting alongside
Clinton and Singapore’s Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, among others. Others
at that meeting who can be seen seated alongside Clinton, Epstein and Maxwell
are Harvard-educated, Singaporean politicians George Yeo Yong-Boon and
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who were then working in the Ministry for Trade and
Industry. Both of those politicians are now part of the leadership bodies of the

World Economic Forum. Also present was the then US ambassador to
Singapore Steven Green, who had been appointed when Clinton was president in
1997 and continued to serve through the earlier part of George W. Bush's first
term.*8

Green was previously the head of E-IT holdings, which was rescued from
bankruptcy thanks to a cash infusion from corporate raider (and later Epstein
associate) Leon Black. Green, after he began working for Samsonite
Corporation, was “a frequent flyer on the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s
trade missions” and in the mid-1990s, prior to being appointed ambassador to
Singapore by Clinton, had donated $10,000 to the DNC and thousands more to
Democratic candidates. In 1995, Green was placed on president Clinton’s Export
Council, where he served on the Executive and Strategic Communications
Committees.°2 That council was situated within the Commerce Department and
“advises the president on matters related to export performance and develops
policy guidance to promote export expansion” and “provides a forum for
addressing significant trade issues affecting U.S. businesses and workers.”*4 Green,
in other words, seems to have been part of the controversial happenings related to
the Commerce Department in the mid-1990s (see chapters 16 and 17) and was,
notably, given an ambassadorship to Singapore, a country which played a minor
role in aspects of that scandal, during that period of time.

After the dinner meeting, Clinton went on to meet Goh Chok Tong’s
predecessor, Lee Kuan Yew at the Istana, the official residence of Singapore's
president.

After a two night stay in Singapore, the group flew to Bangkok, Thailand,
where they had a short lay-over before flying on to a meeting with the Sultan of
Brunei, arriving on May 25, 2002.22 Upon arriving in Brunei, they were welcomed
by the Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah, who made the group his guests of honor for a
meal at the Istana Nurul Izzah, which was discussed in the government-run media
outlet Pelita Brunei a few days after the meeting on May 29, 2002.93

The Sultan of Brunei and some of his relatives have faced disturbing
accusations of illegal sexual behavior over the years. The rulers of Brunei have
become well renowned for throwing lavish and outrageous parties where they
import Western models, strippers, and prostitutes to entertain the members of the
royal family. This is despite the fact that prostitution and paying for sexual services
is a serious criminal offense in the country. Epstein had some notable, indirect

connections with the Sultan of Brunei, who, for example, owned the building
where Epstein’s offices at the Villard Houses were located (see chapter 11). As
noted in chapter 7, the Sultan of Brunei had also been involved in covert Contra
support efforts.

In 1997, Shannon Marketic, a former-Miss USA, took legal action against Jefri
Bolkiah — the Prince of Brunei — saying that she and other women were hired for
promotional modeling work but instead found themselves being held “virtual
prisoners.’ Marketic claimed that they were drugged during their captivity and
forced to act as sex slaves for members of the Brunei royal family. Eventually, the
court ruled that the sultan had sovereign immunity as head of state and the case
was dismissed.

The group that had flown in on Epstein’s plane spent two nights in Brunei,
before flying out of Brunei International Airport. Here, at their departure from
Brunei, Clinton's group and Epstein’s entourage went their separate ways, with
Epstein and company continuing on to Indonesia, where they would spend two
days before flying out to Sri Lanka.

In addition to this trip, Clinton's last trip on Epstein’s plane, in November
2003, also saw him travel to Hong Kong and China. On that trip, he traveled to the
Far East with Epstein after touting and developing his “philanthropic” projects in
the developing world with European officials. As will be noted later, Clinton also
traveled to China and Taiwan with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2005.>=

The fact that Clinton made two major trips to these countries on Epstein’s
plane (and a later one with Maxwell) takes on new significance when considering
the subjects of chapters 16 and 17, which detailed the intersections of Epstein’s
visits and activities with the Clinton White House and how it related to
administration scandals involving China. The Singapore visit seems particularly
significant as there is photographic evidence of Epstein and Maxwell meeting that
country’s then head of state alongside Clinton. As previously mentioned in
chapter 16, Mark Middleton’s suspect activities in the 1990s, in addition to his
involvement with Epstein, saw him accused of receiving funds from Chinese
military intelligence via entities in Singapore. The country was also the site of
major Lippo Group (i.e. Riady family-owned) businesses. In addition, Steven
Green's aforementioned history and presence at this meeting is also noteworthy.

After the trip to Asia in May 2002, Epstein accompanied Clinton on another
trip associated with the Clinton Foundation later that year, this time to Africa. In

September 2002, President Clinton flouted his normal security protocols while
traveling with Epstein and his entourage. This time, in the name of “charity,” the
group brought along some celebrity additions. Throughout this week-long African
sojourn, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sarah Kellen would host not only
President Clinton, but also actor Kevin Spacey as well as comedian Chris Tucker.
Spacey was, a few years later, charged with sexual assault and has been accused of
sexual abuse by several men over the years, beginning in 2005, then again in 2008
and in 2013 as well as more recently in early 2022.°° As of the writing of this
book, he has yet to be convicted.

The flight logs also show that other travelers included Clinton’s advisor Doug
Band as well as American businessman Ron Burkle, the co-founder of the Yucaipa
Companies, LLC, a private investment firm. He formed Yucaipa Co. in 1986 while
he was in his mid-30s and his subsequent rise was meteoric. In a 2010 article
published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was noted that: “With the fortune has
come attention, most of it unwanted. At times the subject of salacious gossip, Mr.
Burkle fanatically tries to guard his privacy.’ Many of Burkle’s close associations
with the usual suspects may be the likely reason for the billionaire’s success.

For instance, a 2006 New York Times article described the wealthy business
man as follows: “Mr. Burkle, a kingmaker in California political circles and a
confidant of a former governor, Gray Davis, has also been a loyal supporter of Mr.
Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, who both now have business
relationships with him.”°4 By the time of the Africa trip, Clinton was also on
Burkle’s payroll, as the former-president was serving as an advisor to Yucaipa.
Clinton is believed to have earned around $15 million in five years of working for
Burkle’s company.*® Burkle told Forbes in 2006 that, at the time, he “figures he
accompanies Clinton at least half the time Clinton travels abroad.”>2

The aforementioned Times article also states that Burkle “had a highly
publicized falling-out with Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood power broker,
several years ago, and came under the news media microscope in late 2000 for
soliciting Mr. Clinton about a possible pardon for Michael Milken, the former
junk-bond king and convicted felon. But for the most part, Mr. Burkle, who sits on
the boards of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation and Yahoo, has avoiding
engaging in high-profile business disputes.”

As previously mentioned in earlier chapters, Occidental Petroleum has long
been associated with corporate raiders and other suspect characters explored

throughout this book, especially its long-time head, Armand Hammer. In
addition, Burkle’s effort to solicit a pardon for Michael Milken speaks to Burkle’s
own past association with the “junk bond king,” as Milken had been involved with
Burkle’s early rise and at least one of Yucaipa’s early successes.“ Burkle has many
other interesting connections. For instance, described as “a former family friend of
Michael Jackson,” Burkle purchased the late singer’s Neverland Ranch in 2020.61

Joining Ron Burkle, Clinton, Epstein, and others on this trip to Africa was
Casey Wasserman, an American entertainment executive and the grandson of
“supermob” kingpin and longtime head of MCA, Lew Wasserman. Casey
Wasserman was the son of Jack Norman Myers (formerly Meyrowitz) and Lynne
Wasserman. Casey's father was once convicted alongside reputed mobster Chris
Petti for money-laundering.

After his parents divorced, Casey began using his mother’s maiden name,
Wasserman, suggesting that he wanted to play up the connections shared by the
maternal side of his family. In an interview with Jack Myers conducted by author
Dennis McDougal, who wrote The Last Mogul: a biography of Lew Wasserman,
Myers said: “My son changed his name to Wasserman, I said, ‘Casey, first of all
everyone will think you're a fool if you do that. You look like an idiot.” But
Wasserman was obviously more interested in the clout his mother’s maiden name
would afford him than keeping his father’s name intact.

Indeed, Casey Wasserman would eventually become president and chief
executive officer of the Wasserman Foundation, which was founded by Lew and
Edie Wasserman in 1952. The Wasserman Foundation eventually became a major
contributor to the Los Angeles Police Foundation as well as a major donor to the
Democratic Party. In addition, Casey Wasserman’s wife, Laura, was the
granddaughter of none other than the organized crime-linked lawyer Paul Ziffren,
previously mentioned in chapters 1 and 9. Thus, Casey Wasserman seems to have
had an apparent interest in operating within the same networks as his grandfather.

As previously noted in chapter 16, the Wassermans were major political
patrons of the Clintons. As noted by Variety: “In 1991, Bill Clinton attended his
first major introduction to Hollywood fundraising circles at the home, when the
Wassermans hosted an event that August for the Democratic National Committee.
They threw another fundraiser for him in August of 1992, and then after he won
the presidency that December, according to Variety archives.”® The article goes
on to note that:

Other guests at the [Wasserman] home through the years including a host of governors and
senators, as well as Henry Kissinger when he was secretary of state. [ Jimmy] Carter was a largely
unknown Georgia governor when he first met Lew Wasserman, but he said in a 1982 interview
that Wasserman’s backing proved “extremely helpful.” “When I decided to run, Mr. Wasserman
was one of the first out-of-state-people I told,’ Carter said, according to the book Mr. and Mrs.

Hollywood. “People respected his judgment in political affairs’

As previously noted in chapter 10, Wasserman was also one of the driving
forces and chief political patrons of Ronald Reagan, making him a “kingmaker” for
several US presidents during his lifetime.

Another big player and Clinton ally who joined this particular trip was
Rodney Slater, who had previously been Secretary of Transportation under
President Bill Clinton, and David Slang, reportedly a personal assistant to Doug
Band. Also listed were the names Andrea Mitrovich, Chauntae Davies, Cindy
Lopez, as well as Jim Kennedy, Gayle Smith, and a man named Eric, whose
surname is illegible. Andrea Mitrovich is listed in Epstein’s contact book as a
“ballerina” and appears on Epstein’s flight logs numerous times, often listed by her
initials “AM.” She flew on numerous flights that also included Bill Clinton aside
from the Africa trip. Chauntae Davies, also on this particular flight, is one of
Epstein’s better known accusers and was allegedly trafficked by him under the
guise of working as a “masseuse?” Cindy Lopez is listed in Epstein’s black book as
being affiliated with Karin Models, the modeling agency tied to Epstein co-
conspirator Jean Luc Brunel discussed in the previous chapter.

Gayle Smith refers to Clinton’s former special assistant and senior director for
African Affairs at the National Security Council in Clinton’s second term. At the
time of the flight, she was working for the Clinton-adjacent Center for American
Progress think tank and, by 2003, was working for the Clinton Global Initiative.
Before joining the Clinton administration, Smith was chief of staff to the head of
the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an alleged CIA cut-
out.2

The trip officially started in Ghana, where Bill Clinton “promote[d] efforts to
curtail the AIDS epidemic and encourage economic development.’ During his
trip to Accra, Clinton met with the then president of Ghana. On this trip to
Ghana, Bill Clinton was the guest of honor at the launch of the Foundation for the
Building of Capital of the Poor (FBCP), a program ostensibly designed to assist in
“mobilizing the assets held by the poor to facilitate their economic development”
and which was also described as a “property reform program.” Clinton was

reported to be a patron of the foundation.© President John Agyekum Kufuor of
Ghana launched the Foundation, which also established a regional training
institute in Accra for the benefit of other African countries interested in these
property reform programs.

The foundation, which was supported by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), was developed jointly by the Ministry of Justice of Ghana
and the Peru Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD). The latter organization
was founded by Peruvian economist and author, Dr. Hernando De Soto, a close
ally of Clinton’s. De Soto had previously delivered a series of lectures in Accra
earlier that same year, reportedly at the invitation of the government and
facilitated by the UNDP. Speaking to reporters upon his arrival at the Kotoka
International Airport on this occasion, De Soto told the press that he had decided
to set up the foundation in Ghana because the country’s government had shown a
commitment to democratic principles by developing proper property
documentation.

Clinton’s meetings in Ghana took place behind closed doors, with African
media outlets at the time stating that, “The discussions were, however, believed to
have centered on the launching of the foundation, economic and political
developments in Africa and other parts of the world.” Clinton also caused
controversy during this trip to Ghana by meeting with former-Ghanaian President
Jerry John Rawlings. The private meeting between Clinton and Rawlings caused
concern among the Ghanaian officials who accused Clinton of diverging from the
agreed protocol for his visit to Ghana. However, Clinton insisted that his visit to
Rawlings had been included on his original itinerary.

The government and organizers of the visit claimed they had not been told
about this meeting beforehand and Clinton’s account of events was soon
contradicted by reports that the US Embassy officials had discreetly informed the
Rawlings’s household that Clinton planned to visit him on the same day that visit
took place. Rawlings’s Special Aide, Victor Smith, confirmed that they had been
formally informed of a request by Clinton to meet Rawlings the same day of the
meeting: “We received the information at 11am today.”

The Epstein-Clinton group then left Accra and landed in Abuja, Nigeria, for
the next stop of their African tour. When leaving Ghana, the passengers of
Epstein’s plane were seen off by Alphonse Arthur, who was Director of State
Protocol, as well as officials stationed at the US Embassy in Accra. The group’s

next stop in Nigeria saw the former-president give a speech at the annual lecture
of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) at the ECOWAS
Secretariat in Abuja. His lecture was entitled “Democratisation and Economic
Development” and seemed to follow a similar tone to his previous public
statements made during his time in Ghana.

After Nigeria, the group journeyed onto Rwanda.“ Clinton began his visit on
this occasion at Kicukiro Health Centre and then had lunch with the President of
Rwanda, H.E. Paul Kagame and First Lady Mrs. Jeanette Kagame at State House,
Kigali. Clinton also visited the Gisozi Genocide Memorial site and Ndera village,
where villagers were reportedly receiving support from the Clinton Foundation.

At Kicukiro Health Centre, President Clinton had signed an agreement
between the Clinton Foundation and the Government of Rwanda to “to help
Rwanda provide drugs and care to HIV /AIDS patients, train health workers and
develop health services.” Speaking at the health center, President Clinton stated
that, “I believe reversing the AIDS (pandemic) is the most important issue that is
facing the whole world. It should unite all people”

Again, on this leg of the trip it was reported that Clinton was “accompanied by
actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker” and that Clinton was “in Africa to
promote efforts to fight AIDS and encourage economic development.’ The
former-president and his entourage left Rwanda for their next leg of their journey,
arriving in Maputo, Mozambique, on Wednesday evening. Clinton's visit to
Mozambique was a two-day event and the group disembarked at Maputo
International Airport, where they were greeted by President Joaquim Chissano.
Clinton gave another speech, pledging to help attract further US investment to
Mozambique. Clinton and the then-Prime Minister of Mozambique, Pascaol
Manuel Mocumbi, then signed a joint-memorandum on HIV/AIDS.

The last leg of the group’s journey saw them travel to South Africa, where
President Clinton delivered an address on the future of Africa and the role of the
international community. He also joined Nelson Mandela in an event to recognize
the importance of a project called “loveLife” as a model for global HIV/AIDS
prevention. “loveLife” was a project largely financed by the Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation in partnership with the South African Government and the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was created with the goal of reducing
South Africa’s youth HIV/AIDS infection rate by 50 percent in five years.

Per Clinton, this mission to promote specific HIV and AIDS solutions in
Africa had been formed with key input from Jeffrey Epstein. This is significant as
Clintons AIDS work closely intersected with that of another man of influence
whose philanthropy was also intimately tied to Epstein: Bill Gates (see chapter
20). In addition, well after this visit, in 2012, Epstein claimed that he does “lots of
work in Africa” and further described Africa as “a fertile ground for
experimentation because it has been so underdeveloped.” At the time, Epstein
had no formal presence or organization in Africa, suggesting that his claims of
doing “lots of work in Africa” may have been based around his continued
involvement in Africa-focused initiatives of the Clinton and/or Gates
“philanthropies,’ potentially with a focus on HIV/AIDS, well after this trip in
2002.

After the Africa trip, the group flew to the United Kingdom, where Prince
Andrew arranged for Maxwell, Epstein, Bill Clinton, and Kevin Spacey to visit
Buckingham Palace in September 2002. Maxwell and Spacey were photographed
sitting in the palace’s throne room.”

In his apparent role in helping plan and lending his jet to Clinton's fledgling
“philanthropies,’ Epstein had, perhaps unexpectedly, gained the media's attention
due to his increasingly public globetrotting with the former president. Epstein, in
2002, suggested that the raising of his public profile had created unintended
consequences: “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was
a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even
Kasparov makes them. You move on.”°2

Indeed, prior to the Africa trip, Epstein only appeared in reports, mainly in the
British press, that focused on (and speculated about) the nature of his relationship
with Ghislaine Maxwell as well as his relationship with Prince Andrew. When
Epstein’s relationship with Clinton began to garner press attention, it was one of
the first times that Epstein was scrutinized by the American press.

However, Maxwell herself apparently cultivated a relationship with Clinton
during the period in which Epstein was involved with the Clinton philanthropies.
For instance, Maxwell reportedly accompanied Clinton on Ron Burkle’s private
jet to India in November 2003.8} That trip was also associated with Clinton's
philanthropic endeavors, but - notably - Epstein was not present. In addition,
Maxwell accompanied Clinton, alongside billionaire philanthropist Ted Waitt — a

former tech mogul and then-boyfriend of Ghislaine’s, on another trip to Asia in
2005 that included visits to Taiwan, Japan, and China.®2

Vicky Ward has reported that Maxwell, at the time, was considered by
Clinton's staff as “just as important as Jeffrey — if not more so” in terms of
fundraising for the Clinton Foundation and was deemed as the “go-to person for
‘financial asks’ for Jeffrey's money by the Clinton Foundation and then the Global
Initiative” Some of Epstein’s donations to Clinton’s philanthropies included a
“high six-figure sum” in 2005 to become founding members of the CGI. As a
result, Maxwell was “constantly being asked” to attend VIP events associated with
the Clinton Foundation and the CGI.

At that time, and shortly after the alleged trip of Epstein’s and Clinton’s to
China in 2005, Maxwell and Clinton were reported to have grown closer and
Epstein “seemed to be completely left behind.” This can be seen in Maxwell being
a guest to Chelsea Clintons wedding in 2010 and the involvement of her
subsequent philanthropy, TerraMar, with the CGI. Some authors have since
alleged that Clinton and Maxwell began having an affair at this time because
Clinton visited Maxwell's New York residence numerous times and they were seen
dining together.8* However, as previously mentioned, Maxwell also engaged in the
same behavior with Prince Andrew and this was likely just part of the behaviors
that Maxwell used to enthrall and manipulate powerful men.

Endnotes

11
12

Saskia Sissons, “Mysterious Business of the Queen of NY-Lon,” Sunday Times (London),
November 12, 2000, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-

NZ Herald, “Epstein ‘boasted’ about Selling Prince Andrew’s ‘Secrets’ to Israeli Spies.”
Nigel Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer; She’s the Daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's Manipulating
His Jetset Lifestyle,” Evening Standard (London), January 22, 2001,

THE-DAUGHTER-OF-ROBERT-MAXWELL-AND-1.pdf.

Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy, “So Is Fergie Trying to Show Andy What He Is Missing?,” Daily
Mail (London), February 12, 2000, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/So-is-Fergie-trying-to-show-Andy-what-he-is-missing__As-1.pdf.
Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

Richard Kay “The romantic lunch; Holding hands across a table, Maxwell's daughter and
Prince Andrew,’ Daily Mail, April 22, 2000, https://unlimitedhangout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2022/08/The-romantic-lunch Holding-hands-across-a-table_-Maxwel.pdf.

“The Duke of Hazzards,’ Evening Standard (London), June 1, 2007, https://www.mint-
pressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/THE-DUKE-OF-HAZZARDS. pdf.

Sissons, “Mysterious Business.”
Rosser, “Andrew’s Fixer.’

Lauren Hubbard, “Prince Andrew Once Dated an American Actress,” Town & Country,
November 21, 2020,

andrew-american-actress-girlfriend/.

Helen Thomas, “Who Is Caroline Stanbury? Star of Ladies of London and Ex of Prince
Andrew,’ The Sun, April 5, 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/2883167/caroline-
stanbury-ladies-of-london-ex-prince-andrew/.

Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer”; Sissons, “Mysterious Business.’

Michael Robotham, “The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Secret Love; Revealed: The Unlikely
Romance Between a Business Spy and the Crooked Financier’s Favourite Daughter,’ Mail on
Sunday (London), November 15, 1992, https://unlimitedhangout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2022/03/The-Mystery-Of-Ghislaine-Maxwell S-Secret-Love Revealed-
1.pdf.

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19
20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer.”

Tom Sykes, “Flight Logs Reportedly Link Prince Andrew to Alleged Jeffrey Epstein Victim
Virginia Roberts,’ The Daily Beast, August 20, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/flight-
logs-reportedly-link-prince-andrew-to-alleged-jeffrey-epstein-victim-virginia-roberts.
Brad Hunter, “Ghislaine Maxwell's Brother Claims Prince Andrew Had ‘no Option’ in $20M
Deal,’ Toronto Sun, April 16, 2022, https://torontosun.com/news/world/ghislaine-maxwells-
brother-claims-prince-andrew-had-no-option-in-20m-deal.

Lauren del Valle, “Prince Andrew Has Paid Settlement to Virginia Giuffre, According to Her
Attorney,’ CNN, March 8, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/08/us/prince-andrew-
virginia-giuffre-settlement/index.html.

Rosser, “Andrew’s Fixer.’
Benjamin Weiser, “Massage’ Was Code for ‘Sex’: New Epstein Abuse Revelations,’ New York

documents.html; Talia Kaplan, “Jeffrey Epstein Florida Mansion Police Video Shows Massage
Tables Allegedly Used for Sex Acts with Minors,” Fox News, August 30, 2019,

“Buckingham Palace Royal Diary, 10 May 2000,” No. 12/2000 ROYAL DIARY - PART ONE OF
THREE PARTS, April 12, 2000,

https://web.archive.org/web/200005 1023441 1/http://porch.ccta.gov.uk/coi/coipress.nsf/6d
d085f9e5a8e859802567350059376b/f2cadedca00f865b802568bf-005708d3?
OpenDocument.

“Clare Balding BBC Radio 4 Appeal, The Outward Bound Trust,’ BBC, January 20, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220117133034/https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013
hbz.

Telegraph Reporters, “Prince Andrew Resigns from Outward Bound Trust as Aides Confirm
He Will Continue Working for Pitch@Palace,’ The Telegraph, November 21, 2019,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2019/11/21/prince-andrew-resigns-outward-
bound-trust-aides-confirm-will/.

“His Royal Highness’s UKTI Engagements in 2007,’ The Duke of York, August 26, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070826043756/http://www.thedukeofyork.org/output/Page
2/67.asp.

“10 Facts about The Duke of York and UK Trade and Investment,’ The Duke of York, August
26, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070826122804/http://www.thedukeofyork.org/output/Page
5771.asp.

David Brown, “Prince Andrew Attacked for Opening Door to Arms Dealers,’ The Australian,
April 11, 2011,
https://web.archive.org/web/20181224003401/https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wo
rld/prince-andrew-attacked-for-opening-door-to-arms-dealers/news-
story/c35acb2ba8d3c7f06a1965e7d9f4e29e.

32

33

34

35
36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

Rob Evans and David Leigh, “WikiLeaks Cables: Prince Andrew Demanded Special BAE
Briefing,’ The Guardian, November 30, 2010,
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/30/prince-andrew-wikileaks-cables.

Harriet Sherwood, “Peter Ball, Former C of E Bishop Jailed for Sexual Abuse, Dies at 87,” The

bishop-jailed-sexual-abuse-dead-at-87.

Landon Thomas Jr, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,’ New York
Magazine, October 28, 2002,

ews/people/n_7912/.

Thomas, “International Moneyman.”

Tom Watson, “Exploding Philanthropy: What the Clinton Party Really Meant,’ HuffPost,

wh b 30381.

“What Is Venture Philanthropy?,” Investopedia, February 22, 2016,

Matthew J. Belvedere, “Bill Gates: My ‘best Investment’ Turned $10 Billion into $200 Billion
Worth of Economic Benefit,’ CNBC, January 23, 2019,
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/billgates-turns-10-billion-into-200-billion-worth-of-
economic-benefit.html.

Daniel Halper and Bob Fredericks, “Emails Reveal Hillary's Shocking Pay-for-Play Scheme,’

debate/504803/.

Maggie Haberman, “Hillary Clinton’s next Act,” POLITICO, August 13, 2013,

“Gayle Smith, Co-Chair of the Enough Project,’ Enough Project,
https://enoughproject.org/files/Gayle_Smith.pdf.

Malia Zimmerman, “Billionaire Sex Offender Epstein Once Claimed He Co-Founded Clinton
Foundation,’ Fox News, July 6, 2016, https://www.foxnews.com/us/billionaire-sex-offender-
epstein-once-claimed-he-co-founded-clinton-foundation.

Watson, “Exploding Philanthropy”; Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick, “Unease at
Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions,” New York Times, August 14, 2013,
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/us/politics/unease-at-clinton-foundation-over-
finances-and-ambitions.html.

“Clinton to Represent Bush at Timor Event,” New York Times, May 8, 2002,
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/08/world/clinton-to-represent-bush-at-timor-
event.html.

“Clinton Receives Honorary Law Doctorate from Japan,’ Donga, May 22, 2002,
https://www.donga.com/en/article/all/20020522/222784/1/Clinton-Receives-Honorary-

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

Law-Doctorate-from-Japan.

“Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong Hosts Dinner for Former United States President Bill Clinton
at Jade Restaurant, The Fullerton Singapore,’ National Archives of Singapore, May 23, 2002,
https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/a9549bbb-1162-11e3-
83d5-0050568939ad; “Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong Hosts Dinner for Former United States
President Bill Clinton at Jade Restaurant, The Fullerton Singapore (Group Photo), National
Archives of Singapore, May 23, 2002,
https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/577bde17-1162-11e3-
83d5-0050568939ad.

George Yeo Yong Bon is on the board of the World Economic Forum Foundation, See:
“World Economic Forum Announces New Foundation Board Members,’ World Economic
Forum, August 21, 2014, https://www.weforum.org/press/2014/08/world-economic-forum-
announces-new-foundation-board-members/. ; Tharman Shanmugaratnam is on the board
of trustees of the World Economic Forum, See: “Leadership and Governance,’ World
Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/about/leadership-and-governance/.

“Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong Hosts Dinner for Former United States President Bill Clinton
at Jade Restaurant, The Fullerton Singapore (George Yeo Yong-Boon, Bill Clinton, Goh Chok
Tong, Steven Green),’ National Archives of Singapore, May 23, 2002,
https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/a954ae48-1162-11e3-
83d5-0050568939ad

“Riding the Gravy Train to Post as Ambassador,’ Denver Business Journal, December 21, 1997,
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/1997/12/22/editorial1 html.

“Steven J. Green,’ Council of American Ambassadors,
https://www.americanambassadors.org/members/steven-j-green.

“Sanford Weill Named to President Clinton's Export Council,” Weill Cornell Medicine, May 25,
2000, https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2000/05/sanford-weill-named-to-president-
clintons-export-council.

“Clinton Makes Stop in Brunei,’ Huron Daily Tribune, May 26, 2002,
https://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article/Clinton-Makes-Stop-in-Brunei-
7354325.php.

“Clinton Meeting with Sultan,’ Pelita Brunei, May 29, 2002,

Tim Cornwall, “So Who's Telling Lies: The Swinging Sultan or the ‘white Slave?” The
Independent, May 10, 1997, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/so-who-s-telling-
lies-the-swinging-sultan-or-the-white-slave-beauty-1260898.html.

Daniel Bates, “Bill Clinton Took TWO MORE Trips with Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell,” Mail
Online, July 15, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9789355/Bill-Clinton-took-
TWO-trips-Jeffrey-Epstein-Ghislaine-Maxwell.html.

Rob Picheta and Jo Shelley, “Kevin Spacey Appears in London Court after Being Charged
with Sexual Assault,’ CNN, June 16, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/16/uk/kevin-
spacey-london-sexual-assault-hearing-gbr-intl/index.html.

Timothy L. O’Brien, “A California Billionaire Who Avoided the Spotlight Suddenly Finds
Himself in It,” New York Times, April 8, 2006,

spotlight-suddenly-finds.html.

58

59

60
61

62

63

64
65

66

67
68

69
70
71

72

Susan Berfield, “The Other Ron Burkle,’ Bloomberg, March 4, 2010,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160306080521/http://www.bloomberg.com:80/bw/magazi
ne/content/10_11/b4170042334079.htm#p2.

Matthew Miller, “The Rise Of Ron Burkle,” Forbes, November 24, 2006,
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1211/104.html.

Berfield, “The Other Ron Burkle.’

Deanna Hackney and Alanne Orjoux, “Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch sold to Pittsburgh
Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle,’ CNN, December 27, 2020,
https://web.archive.org/web/2021012602051 1/https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/27/us/nev
erland-ranch-purchased-penguins-burkle/index.html.

Alan Abrahamson, “Alleged Courier for Silberman Gets Probation: Courts: Banker Jack
Norman Myers, Who Testified in Money-Laundering Case of Silberman and Petti, Avoids Jail
in Plea Bargain,’ Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1990-11-06-me-3842-story.html.

Ted Johnson, “Hillary Clinton’s Final L.A. Campaign Fundraiser Will Be at Site Steeped in
Hollywood-D.C. History,’ Variety, October 13, 2016,

wasserman-1201888222/.

Johnson, “Hillary Clinton’s Final L.A. Campaign Fundraiser.’

See “USAID: A Front for Cia Intelligence Gathering,’ Wrong Kind of Green, May 14, 2013,
gathering/: “Is USAID the New CIA? Agency Secretly Built Cuban Twitter Program to Fuel
Anti-Castro Protests,’ Democracy Now, April 4, 2014,

“CIA Front, USAID, Gearing Up in Ukraine - Suharto ll?” Shadowproof, May 14, 2014,
https://shadowproof.com/2014/05/14/cia-front-usaid-gearing-up-in-ukraine-suharto-ii/;
Catherine A. Traywick, “Cuban Twitter’ and Other Times USAID Pretended To Be an
Intelligence Agency,’ Foreign Policy, April 3, 2014,

be-an-intelligence-agency/.

“Clinton, De Soto Arrive,’ Ghana Web, September 22, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20021218203744/http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePa
ge/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=27637.

“Clinton, De Soto Arrive.’

“Clinton Meets Rawlings against Protocol Arrangement,’ Ghana Homepage, December 18,
2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20021218200946/http://www.ghanaweb.com/Ghana-
HomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=27684.

“Clinton Meets Rawlings against Protocol Arrangement.’

“Clinton, De Soto Arrive.’

Eddy Odivwri, “Solutions to Nation's Problems Within, Says Clinton,” Al/Africa.com,
September 25, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20021014093438/http://allafrica.com/stories/200209250147.h
tml.

Rodrique Ngowi, “Clinton Offers to Help Rwanda Combat AIDS after Genocide Including
Rape and Deliberate HIV Infection,’ Rwanda Information Exchange, September 25, 2002,

73
74
75

76

77
78

79

80
81
82

83
84

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004075243/http://www.rwanda.net/english/News/news
092002/nouv09242002.htm.

Ngowi, “Clinton Offers to Help Rwanda Combat AIDS.”

Ngowi, “Clinton Offers to Help Rwanda Combat AIDS”

“Clinton Visits the Country,’ AIM Page, Issue 2923, September 24, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20021002012309fw_/http://www.sortmoz.com/aimnews/Port
uguese/edicoes/2923p.htm.

Grant Williams, “Clinton’s Good-Works Plan,’ The Chronicle of Philanthropy Gifts & Grants,
October 17, 2002,

1/01000601.htm.
Williams, “Clinton’s Good-Works Plan.’
“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission (2012), p. 15,

Economic.html.

Robert Mendick, “Exclusive: How Ghislaine Maxwell and Kevin Spacey Relaxed at
Buckingham Palace ‘as Guests of Prince Andrew” The Telegraph, July 3, 2020,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/03/exclusivehow-ghislaine-maxwell-kevin-
spacey-relaxed-buckingham/.

Thomas, “International Moneyman.”

Bates, “Bill Clinton Took TWO MORE Trips.’

Vicky Ward, “Ghislaine’s Doomed Escape Bid,’ July 15, 2021, in Chasing Ghislaine,
https://www.audible.com/pd/Chasing-Ghislaine-Podcast/B09887Z858,

Bates, “Bill Clinton Took TWO MORE Trips.’

Bates, “Bill Clinton Took TWO MORE Trips.’

CHAPTER 20

EPSTEIN, EDGE, AND BIG TECH

MICROSOFT AND THE MAXWELLS

he 2001 article by Nigel Rosser that was published in the Evening Standard,

discussed at length in the previous chapter, also contained other, telling
revelations about Epstein and his activities aside from his connections to Prince
Andrew and allegations of his ties to US and Israeli intelligence.

One of the most interesting lines in that article provides perhaps the first
major clue toward demystifying the true origin of Epstein’s relationship with
another powerful man of influence, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire
“philanthropist” Bill Gates.

In his article, shortly after introducing Epstein as an “immensely powerful
New York property develop and financier,’ Rosser states that Epstein “has made
many millions out of his business links with the likes of Bill Gates, Donald Trump,
and Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner, whose trust he runs”! Both Wexner’s and
Trump’s relationships with Epstein prior to 2001 have already been discussed at
length in this book and date back to around 1985 and 1987, respectively.
Mainstream media, however, continue to report that Gates and Epstein first met in
2011 and have declined to follow the leads laid out by Nigel Rosser. I am
personally aware of this withholding of information to a degree as a BBC reporter
contacted me in 2019 for details about this 2001 Evening Standard article, which I
provided. To date, the BBC has never reported on the contents of that article.
Notably, the BBC has received millions in funding over many years from the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation.

Some may argue that the addition of Gates’s name here may have been in
error. However, Rosser’s article was never retracted or even challenged. In
addition, Gates, Trump, and Wexner never — collectively or separately — disputed
the claims made in the article at the time, which was published well before Epstein
became notorious. In addition, given that Gates is named alongside two known
close Epstein associates at the time - Donald Trump and Leslie Wexner — it
further suggests that Gates’s ties to Epstein prior to 2001 were considerable
enough to warrant his mention alongside these two other men.

In addition to the Evening Standard article, there is evidence from Maria
Farmer, an Epstein victim who was employed by Epstein and Maxwell from 1995
to 1996. She has stated that she recalled hearing Epstein mention Bill Gates in

such a way as to imply they were close friends and which gave her the impression
that the Microsoft cofounder might soon be visiting one of Epstein’s residences.

Beyond these two key pieces of evidence, there is also the fact that, prior to
the Evening Standard article, Gates’s Microsoft, which he still led at the time,
already had a documented connection to a business run by Ghislaine Maxwell's
sisters in which Ghislaine had a financial stake. This may offer a clue as to the
nature of the “business links” alluded to by Nigel Rosser. Furthermore, the odd
nature of Gates’s relationship with Isabel Maxwell, who has ties to the PROMIS
software espionage scandal (see chapter 9) and to Israeli intelligence, is
documented in a 2000 article from the Guardian.

As previously noted in chapter 15, twin sisters Christine and Isabel Maxwell,
along with their husbands at the time, created the McKinley Group in January
1992. Christine and Isabel had both previously worked for the front company
Information on Demand used by their father Robert Maxwell to sell the
compromised PROMIS software to the US government (see chapter 9).* After
Robert Maxwell's death, Christine and Isabel had “wanted to circle the wagons
and rebuild” and saw McKinley as “a chance to recreate a bit of their father’s
legacy” The McKinley Group, however, was not solely a venture of Isabel,
Christine, and their husbands, as Ghislaine Maxwell also had “a substantial
interest” in the company, according to a Sunday Times article published in
November 2000.6

That same article also noted that Ghislaine, throughout the 1990s, had “been
discreetly building up a business empire as opaque as her father’s” and that “she is
secretive to the point of paranoia and her business affairs are deeply mysterious.”

399

She chose to describe “herself as an ‘internet operator” during this period, even
though “her office in Manhattan refuses to confirm even the name or the nature of
her business.” Another article, appearing in The Scotsman from 2001, separately
notes that Ghislaine “is extremely secretive about her affairs and describes herself
as an internet operator”?

It is unclear how involved Ghislaine actually was in the McKinley Group’s
affairs. McKinley created what became known as the Magellan Internet Directory,
remembered as “the first site to publish lengthy reviews and ratings of websites.’
Magellan's “value-added content” approach attracted several large corporations,
resulting in “major alliances” with AT&T, Time-Warner, IBM, Netcom, and the

Microsoft Network (MSN) that were all negotiated by Isabel Maxwell.’

Microsoft’s major alliance with McKinley came in late 1995, when Microsoft
announced that Magellan would power the search option for the company’s MSN
service.”

McKinley’s fortunes fell, as its effort to become the first search engine to go
public failed, igniting a stand-off between Christine Maxwell and Isabel’s then
husband that also resulted in the company essentially falling behind other market
leaders.+? As a result, McKinley missed the window for a second IPO attempt and
continued to lag behind in adding ad revenue to their business model. Excite,
which was later acquired by AskJeeves, ultimately bought the McKinley Group
and Magellan for 1.2 million shares of Excite in 1996, which was then valued at
$18 million. It was said that it was Isabel Maxwell who made the deal possible,
with Excite’s CEO at the time, George Bell, claiming she alone salvaged their
purchase of McKinley./2

Despite McKinley’s lackluster end, the Maxwell twins and other stakeholders
in the company, Ghislaine Maxwell among them, not only obtained a
multimillion-dollar payout from the deal but also forged close connections with
Silicon Valley high rollers. It is unclear if the money Ghislaine received from the
sale was used to further the sexual trafficking and influence operations she was
then conducting alongside Jeffrey Epstein.

After the sale of McKinley/Magellan, the overt ties of Christine and Isabel
Maxwell to intelligence in both the US and Israel grew considerably. Isabel’s ties to
Microsoft also persisted following the sale of the McKinley Group. She became
president of the Israeli tech company CommTouch, the funding of which was
linked to individuals and groups involved in the Jonathan Pollard nuclear spying
affair.

COMMTOUCH AND ISABEL MAXWELL

1G 1992, Israel’s government created the Yozma Program at the urging of the

Chief Scientist of Israel's Ministry of Industry and Trade, Yigal Erlich, as Erlich
moved to leave that position. The Yozma Program sought to “incentivize venture
investment” by creating state-linked venture capital funds, which would spawn a
myriad of Israeli hi-tech startups with the goal of merging them with major,
foreign technology companies.*® According to Erlich’s website, he had lobbied
Israels government to launch Yozma because he had “identified a market failure
and a huge need in Israel to establish for the first time a professionally-managed
venture capital industry that will fund the exponential growth of high tech

”16 He then “convinced the Israeli government to

ventures coming out of Israel
allocate $100 million for his venture capital vision.”

Erlich’s vision would also result in the fusion of Israel’s hi-tech sector, which
he helped to create, with Israel's intelligence apparatus, specifically Israel's signal
intelligence agency, Unit 8200. This also resulted in numerous Israeli hi-tech
conglomerates that were created with funding from the Yozma program, and their
successors, doubling as tools of Israeli espionage.

By 2012, the use of Israeli tech companies as fronts for intelligence would
become an open secret. As reported by the Israeli media outlet Calcalist Tech, the
Israeli government by 2012 embarked on a formal policy that saw “cyber-related
and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli
military and Israel’s main intelligence arms [be] transferred to companies that, in
some cases, were built for this exact purpose”! One of the front companies
named in that particular article is Black Cube, which Epstein associate Ehud Barak
would later recommend to movie mogul Harvey Weinstein as a company he could
utilize to harass women who accused him of sexual abuse. Weinstein later invited
Barak and the president of Black Cube to a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.”

Notably, not long before Erlich convinced Israel to place $100 million into
this program, Israeli intelligence, thanks largely to the work of infamous spymaster
Rafi Eitan, had learned the benefits of placing backdoors for their intelligence
services into commercial software through the theft and subversion of the
PROMIS software. As noted in chapter 9, Israel's bugged version of PROMIS was

largely marketed by Robert Maxwell.”2

After the Yozma program was established, the first venture capital fund it
created was called Gemini Israel Ventures and Israels government chose a man
named Ed Mlavsky to lead it. Mlavsky, at the time, was the Executive Director of
the Israel-U.S. Bi-national Industrial Research and Development Foundation
(BIRD), where Erlich was Chairman of the Executive Committee. Mlavsky states
that, while heading the BIRD foundation, “he was responsible for investments of
$100 million in more than 300 joint projects between U.S. and Israeli high-tech
companies”?

BIRD’s connections to Gemini Israel Ventures and the Yozma Program in
general are interesting, given that just a few years prior it had come under scrutiny
for its role in the one of the worst spy cases in US history — the Jonathan Pollard
affair. Jonathan Pollard had been a naval intelligence analyst turned Israeli spy who
passed troves of documents regarding US military technology (specifically nuclear
technology) as well as clandestine US intelligence operations to Israeli
intelligence, specifically to the now defunct spy agency Lekem. Pollard’s handler
was none other than Rafi Eitan, who had also engineered Israel's outsized role in
the PROMIS software scandal.”

In the indictment of Pollard for espionage, it was noted that Pollard delivered
documents to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment
owned by Harold Katz, the then-legal counsel to the BIRD foundation and an
adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Lekem. Government officials told the
New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about
the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.’

Journalist Claudia Wright, writing in 1987, openly speculated about whether
the close ties between Katz and Pollard’s handlers meant that BIRD itself had
been used to pass funds to Pollard or that BIRD funds, most of which were
financed by US taxpayers despite public claims of “joint” funding, had been used
to pay Pollard for his “services” to Israel.” In her article, she notes that Mlavsky
had considerable discretion over the use of those funds while the US official in
charge of overseeing the US’s interests in BIRD did “not know how investment is
regulated” by the foundation. In addition, no US official had access to any audit of
the foundation. Audits were supposedly conducted by an Israel-based accounting
firm, yet that firm had no US offices. The New York Times noted at the time that
Katz specifically “may have knowledge of the method used to pay Mr. Pollard, who

received tens of thousands of dollars from his Israeli handlers”

After BIRD’s Mlavsky was chosen to head Gemini Israel Ventures, one of the
first companies the firm invested in was called CommTouch (now known as
Cyren and majority owned by Warburg-Pincus).24 Founded in 1991 by Gideon
Mantel, a former officer in a “special bomb-squad unit” of the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF), alongside Amir Lev and Nahum Sharfman, CommTouch was
initially focused “on selling, maintaining, and servicing stand-alone email client
software products for mainframe and personal computers”? They specifically
courted Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), meaning companies whose
products are used as components in the products of another company that are
then sold to end users.”2 Integration of its products into those of major software
and hardware developers would allow CommTouch’s products to be widely used
but unseen.“2 A Wired article discussing CommTouch noted as much, stating that
CommTouch products are meant “to be as seamless and unnoticeable as the
copper is to a phone caller%

However, from their founding through early 1997, CommTouch struggled to
stay afloat, unable to turn a profit and unable to secure any notable deals or to
expand the size of the company beyond 25 employees.3 Yet, thanks to Gemini
Israel Ventures and grants from Israel’s government, which were used to finance
the research and development of its products, CommTouch managed to stay
solvent.22 As late as 2006, CommTouch noted in official documents that the
company “has a history of losses and may never achieve profitability,’ further
noting that they repeatedly hemorrhaged millions of dollars a year in net losses.*4
Clearly, the decision by Gemini Israel Ventures and Israel’s government to
continue to pour money into a decidedly unprofitable company for several years
was motivated by something other than profits.

At some point in early 1997, CommTouch decided to enter the US market
and began seeking out a new President for the firm who had “local clout.” “We
knew exactly what we were looking for,’ Gideon Mantel later told Wired of
CommTouch’s search.... “Someone who knows her way around the Valley”3$
They found their woman in Isabel Maxwell, one of the daughters of Israeli
intelligence asset and PROMIS salesman par excellence, Robert Maxwell. Mantel
and CommTouch allegedly chose to court Isabel Maxwell for their company’s
presidency through an unspecified placement company and were “attracted to her
expertise and insight in Silicon Valley when it sought her out”3£ The Israeli outlet
Globes states that Gideon Mantel “went to Isabel Maxwell as soon as he arrived in

Silicon Valley and realized that in order to progress, an e-mail solutions company
like CommTouch needed help from someone who knew the rules of the game.”*4
Wired offers a similar portrayal, further adding that it was “Gideon Mantel [who]
got Isabel Maxwell to take the job”38

Mantel told Jewish Weekly that while Maxwell’s pedigree, i.e. being Robert
Maxwell's daughter, “was very intriguing at the beginning ... it wasn't her name
that made the decision for us$? However, Mantel, in separate reports, compares
Isabel to her father on numerous occasions when praising her professional
abilities. For example, he told Haaretz that Isabel “is not cowed by anyone, and
she never gives in .... She got all that at home. They taught her to go after things
and not give up”® Similarly, he told Wired that “Like her father, she is a fighter,”
later adding that “She always charges. She has no fear. Of course, it is from her
father. It is in her blood.”*+ Given that Robert Maxwell is rarely posthumously
remembered (in media anyway) as “a fighter” and “fearless,” it goes without saying
that Mantel views him with a degree of reverence, which he also associates with
his daughter Isabel.

Isabel, notably, has herself stated on several occasions that her acceptance of
Mantel’s offer to be CommTouch’s President was largely informed by her father’s
controversial ties to Israel. She told Haaretz that her reasons for accepting the
CommTouch presidency had come “from the heart” because it was “a chance to
continue her father’s involvement in Israel,” leading her to reject other more
lucrative job offers from actually established companies that she had received at
the time.” It goes without saying that Robert Maxwell’s “involvement in Israel”
was intimately linked to Israeli intelligence operations. Isabel similarly described
her reasons for joining CommTouch to Jewish Weekly as “an affair of the heart,’
adding that “it had to do with my father and my history43 The New York Times
quoted her as saying that she had “considered other California-based Internet
start-ups [in 1997], but felt a pull toward CommTouch and the Israeli
connection.”#

Isabel has some interesting views on her father, whom she has described as the
“ultimate survivor,” as well as his involvement in Israel.*2 She describes her father
as “highly complex,” adding that she doesn’t “have rose-coloured glasses about
him,” but nonetheless says she is “proud” of his controversial legacy and that “if he
were alive today that he would be proud of us, too.”4¢ She said something similar
to The Guardian in 2002, stating that “Tm sure [my father would] be thrilled to

know what I’m doing now,... throwing back her head and laughing loudly’ In
addition, when asked who the most influential person in her life had been, Isabel
responded “My father was most influential in my life. He was a very accomplished
man and achieved many of his goals during his life. I learned very much from him
and have made many of his ways my own.”#“Isabel told Haaretz around that same
time that “When I was with him [her father], I felt power. Like being at the White
House.... Beyond that, it was a collective power, not my personal power. I was
part of this unit,’ apparently referring to her other siblings, Ghislaine and
Christine among them, and suggesting that they were all collectively extensions of
their father’s power?

However, Isabel stands out from her other siblings, and even Ghislaine, in
terms of a sense of loyalty to her father and to the state of Israel. According to
Elizabeth “Betty” Maxwell, Isabel’s mother, Isabel “is also loyal to the memory of
her father, and to what Judaism represents in her life. All my children were
brought up as Anglicans, but Isabel was very taken by the Jewish faith and the
politics in Israel,’ even when compared to her other children, including
Ghislaine.*2

Indeed, Isabel developed close relationships to several prominent former
Mossad officials and Israeli heads of state, with several of those relationships
having been first “forged by her father”* A now deleted report published by the
Jerusalem Post in 2003, entitled “Isabel Maxwell Fights Back,” notes that “Maxwell
travels in the same circles as her father, but she is more comfortable behind the
camera, not in front of it ... she is carrying on her father’s legacy in Israel, albeit in
her own way.’ It also noted that, by 2003, Isabel was visiting Israel every month,
visiting her father’s grave on the Mount of Olives at least once every visit.

Arguably the most interesting part of this particular Jerusalem Post article is
the way in which Isabel views her father’s legacy. In discussing the book by
Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israels Superspy: The Life and
Death of a Media Mogul, Isabel — even though she participated in interviews for
the book - rejected its premise that her father was a “spy” and went on a private
smear campaign against the book and its authors prior to its publication.
Tellingly, she does not object to the book’s contents regarding her father’s
activities on Israel's behalf, including his role in the PROMIS software scandal or
Iran-Contra, but merely objects to the use of the word “spy” to describe those
activities. “My father was certainly a ‘patriot’ and helped in back business and

political channels between governments,” Isabel told the Jerusalem Post, “But that

did not and does not make him a ‘spy.”=*

It could be said, then, that Isabel would view her subsequent career “in back
business and political channels” within the “same circles as her father” as similarly
“patriotic.” Yet, for those that consider her father a “spy” for his activities, they
could logically state the same of Isabel, who notably self-identifies as Israeli.°=

Aside from these connections, it is worth briefly revisiting Isabel's own
history. As previously detailed in chapter 9, Isabel, as well as her twin sister
Christine, became involved in working for the Israeli intelligence front company
used by her father to sell bugged PROMIS software in the US, Information on
Demand. Isabel's past with Information on Demand must have been known to
CommTouch at the time of Isabel's hiring. It’s also worth noting that, on several
occasions, Isabel asserts that CommTouch owes much of its success to the ties of
its Israeli employees to the Israeli military and Israeli military intelligence,
resulting in a “dogged work ethic” and a “trained mind-set” among its Israeli

workforce.2°

MICROSOFT PUTS COMMTOUCH “ON THE
MAP”

Urn taking the job at the Israeli tech firm, Maxwell's promotion of the

company was described as “almost messianic” even though her enthusiasm
was also described as “hard to fathom” given the lackluster performance of the
company and its products.“ However, soon after becoming CommTouch’s
president, her personal connections to prominent figures in Silicon Valley -
forged through her past work at Magellan — paid off and the company announced
new partnerships with Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and Nippon Telephone and
Telegraph, among others. At CommTouch, Maxwell managed “all sales and
marketing activities for CommTouch and co-direct[ed] strategic business
development.”~?

Some reports have noted that Maxwell’s connections with prominent Silicon
Valley figures were the key to her professional success, with Globes noting that
“Everyone who has worked closely with Maxwell says that her advantage lies in
her ability to help penetrate the market with a new product by opening the right
doors,’ an “advantage” also ascribed to her father while he sold bugged PROMIS
software on behalf of Israeli intelligence? Yet, despite Isabel’s penchant for

“opening the right doors,’ reports well after Maxwell joined the company still
referred to the firm as “an obscure software developer”

However, out of all the alliances and partnerships Isabel negotiated early on
during her time at CommTouch, it was her dealings with Microsoft co-founders
Bill Gates and Paul Allen that would put CommTouch “on the map.” Maxwell
had previously negotiated a major deal with Microsoft's Bill Gates during her time
as the McKinley Group/Magellan’s Executive Vice President, resulting in
Microsoft announcing that the Maxwell-owned Magellan would power the search
option for the company’s MSN service.

Microsoft’s cofounders did much more than put CommTouch “on the map,’
however, as they essentially intervened to prevent the collapse of its initial public
offering, a fate that had befallen Isabel Maxwell’s previous company, the McKinley
Group, not long before. Indeed, CommTouch kept pushing back its IPO until a
massive investment miraculously arrived from firms tied to Microsoft co-founder

Paul Allen, which was announced in July 1999. The investments from Allen’s
Vulcan and Go2Net resulted in a jump in “interest in the stock sale and in
CommTouch, until now an obscure software developer,” according to a Bloomberg
report. The news also inflated the company’s stock price immediately prior to
their going public.®° The money from the Allen-linked companies was specifically
used by CommTouch “to expand sales and marketing and build its presence in
international markets.’

Allens decision to invest in CommTouch seems odd from a financial
perspective, given that the company had never turned a profit and had over $4
million in losses just the year before. Yet, thanks to Allen's timely investment and
his apparent coordination with the company’s repeated delays of its IPO,
CommTouch was valued at over $230 million when it went public, as opposed to
a $150 million valuation just weeks before Allen’s investment. Thus, it is not
exactly clear why Paul Allen came to the rescue of CommTouch’s IPO and what he
expected to gain from his investment.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Allen later became among a member of
an elite online community set up in 2004 called A Small World, whose
membership also included Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein-linked figures such as Lynn
Forester de Rothschild and Naomi Campbell, as well as Petrina Khashoggi, the
daughter of Adnan Khashoggi. A Small World’s largest shareholder was Harvey
Weinstein, the now-disgraced media mogul who was a business partner of Epstein
and who has since been convicted of rape and sexual abuse. In addition, around
this same time, Paul Allen was photographed with Epstein associate Nicole
Junkermann, herself an asset apparently utilized by Epstein to blackmail US
senators during this same period, circa 2002 (see chapters 14 and 18).@
Junkermann would later be placed on the board of an Israeli intelligence-linked
tech company funded by Epstein and Ehud Barak, Carbyne911 (see the next
chapter).

Less than three months after Allen’s investments in CommTouch in October
1999, the company announced that it had struck a major deal with Microsoft
whereby “Microsoft will utilize the CommTouch Custom MailTM service to
provide private label web-based email solutions for select MSN partners and
international markets” In addition, per the agreement, “CommTouch will
provide MSN Messenger Service and Microsoft Passport to its customers while
building upon its Windows NT expertise by supporting future MSN messaging

3

technologies.” “We are looking forward to further enhancing our relationship with
Microsoft by integrating other state-of-the-art Microsoft products,’ Gideon
Mantel of CommTouch said at the time of the deal’s public announcement.

In December 1999, Microsoft announced that it had invested $20 million in
CommTouch by purchasing 4.7 percent of its shares. The announcement
pushed CommTouch stock prices from $11.63 a share to $49.13 in just a few
hours’ time. Part of that deal had been finalized by Richard Sorkin, a recently
appointed CommTouch director. Sorkin had just become a multimillionaire
following the sale of Zip2, Elon Musk’s first company of which Sorkin had been
CEO. Musk’s ties to the broader Epstein network were discussed in chapter 12.

It further appears that Bill Gates, then head of Microsoft, made a personal
investment in CommTouch at the behest of Isabel Maxwell. In an October 2000
article published in the Guardian, Isabel “jokes about persuading Bill Gates to
make a personal investment” in CommTouch sometime during this period.“ The
Guardian article then oddly notes, regarding Isabel Maxwell and Bill Gates:

In a faux southern belle accent, [Isabel] purrs: “He’s got to spend $375m a year to keep his tax-

free status, why not allow me to help him? She explodes with laughter” 23

Given that individuals as wealthy as Gates cannot have “tax-free status” and that this article
was published soon after the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Isabel’s
statements suggest that it was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the
foundation’s endowment assets, that made this sizable investment in CommTouch.

Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the odd way in which Isabel speaks
about her dealings with Gates (“purring,’ speaking in a fake Southern accent),
describing her interactions with him in a way not found in any of her numerous
other interviews on a wide variety of topics. This odd behavior may be related to
Isabel’s previous interactions with Gates and/or the mysterious relationship
between Gates and Epstein that pre-dated Nigel Rosser’s article from January
2001.

After the year 2000, CommTouchs business and clout expanded rapidly, with
Isabel Maxwell subsequently crediting investments from Microsoft, Gates, and
Allen for the company’s good fortune and the success of its effort to enter the US
market. Maxwell, as quoted in the 2002 Larraine Segil book Fastalliances: Power
Your E-Business, states that Microsoft viewed CommTouch as a key “distribution
network,’ adding that “Microsoft's investment in us put us on the map. It gave us
instant credibility, validated our technology and service in the marketplace.“ By

this time, Microsofts ties to CommTouch had deepened through new
partnerships, including CommTouch’s hosting of Microsoft Exchange.”

Though Isabel Maxwell was able to secure lucrative investments and alliances
for CommTouch and saw its products integrated into key software and hardware
components produced and sold by Microsoft and other tech giants, she was
unable to improve the company’s dire financial situation, with CommTouch
netting a loss of $4.4 million in 1998 and similar losses well into the 2000s, with
net losses totaling $24 million in 2000 (just one year after the sizable investments
from Microsoft, Paul Allen, and Gates).7°

The losses continued even after Isabel formally left the company and became
president emeritus in 2001. By 2006, the company was over $170 million in debt.
Isabel Maxwell left her position at CommTouch in 2001 but for years retained a
sizable amount of CommTouch stock valued at the time at around $9.5 million.”
While Maxwell remained honorary president, CommTouch added Yair Shamir,
son of former Israeli Prime Minister and friend of Robert Maxwell, Yitzhak
Shamir, to its board.78 Yair Shamir, Chairman of the Israeli government owned
corporation, IAI (Israeli Aerospace Industries) when he joined CommTouch’s
board, had previously managed Scitex when it was owned by Robert Maxwell.

After nearly collapsing due to its long-standing debt burden a few years later,
CommTouch was rebranded as Cyren and, today, runs in the background of
Microsoft, Google, Intel, McAfee, and Dell products, among many others.

Haaretz wrote in 2002 that Isabel, as CommTouch was in dire financial straits,
1.82 Even the failure of
CommtTouch, the Israeli Internet company she headed, hasn't deterred her: She

had decided to “work only on things involving Israe

still believes in the medium, and she still believes in Israel” Maxwell would
subsequently create “a unique niche for herself in high tech as a liaison between
Israeli companies in the initial development stages and private angel investors in
the US” as a private consultant, subsequently creating Maxwell Communications
Network in 2006.24 That company offered “cross-border communications,
funding, and market research to leading venture capitalists and hi-tech companies
in the US and Israel.”82 However, she notes that her “specialty” was in “helping
Israeli high-tech companies.”

During this period (2001-2006), Isabel would also head an Israeli tech
company that “protects children online,’ at a time when her sister — Ghislaine
Maxwell - was actively abusing and trafficking minors as part of an intelligence-

linked operation alongside Jeffrey Epstein. Isabel took the job at iCognito (now
Pure ae “because it [the company] is in Israel, and because of its
technology% She also joined the board of the Israeli company Backweb
alongside Gil Shwed, a famous alumnus of Unit 8200 (often likened to Israel’s
NSA equivalent) and co-founder of Israeli tech giant Check Point, which is a long-
time partner of CommTouch.®°

Isabel’s close involvement with former Israeli heads of state and heads of
intelligence would only deepen after a CommTouch, particularly with
former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.8? The Jerusalem Post described the
Peres-Isabel relationship as “close” and she, for a! a was governor of the
board of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Today other members of
the center's international board of governors include Mega Group members
Charles Bronfman and Lester Crown, Evelyn de Rothschild, Ronald Lauder, and
Max Fisher’s daughter Jane Sherman, while its board of directors includes Shimon
Peres’s son Chemi Peres and former Mossad director Tamir Pardo.*? Isabel was
also very close to former Mossad deputy director David Kimche until his death in
2010 as well as former head of Israeli military intelligence and Prime Minister
Ehud Barak.22

In the years that followed, Isabel Maxwell became, among other things, a
“technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum and a key fixture at the Israel
Venture Network (IVN), a “venture philanthropy” organization partnered with
the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation and other organizations discussed in
chapters 13 and 14, such as the Jewish Agency.2+ One of IVN’s funds bears the
Yozma name and, like the Yozma program, is formally allied with Israel's
government. IVN’s manager of that particular fund, Itsik Danziger, is a former top
executive at Comverse/Verint, another Israeli tech company tied to Israeli military
intelligence that was discussed in chapter 14 in the context of allegations it spied

on US institutions.22

EPSTEIN AND MICROSOFT

hile Isabel Maxwell and CommTouch offer one possible explanation for

the Gates-Epstein “business ties” discussed by the Evening Standard in
2001, another clue regarding the early Gates-Epstein relationship can be found in
Epstein’s cozy ties with Nathan Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in the 1980s and
became the company’s first chief technology officer in 1996. At the time,
Myhrvold was one of Gates’s closest advisers, if not the closest, and co-wrote
Gates’s 1996 book, The Road Ahead, which sought to explain how emerging
technologies would impact life in the years and decades to come.

In December of the same year that he became Microsoft’s CTO, Myhrvold
traveled on Epstein’s plane from Kentucky to New Jersey, and then again in
January 1997 from New Jersey to Florida. Other passengers accompanying
Myhrvold on these flights included Alan Dershowitz and “GM,” presumably
Ghislaine Maxwell. It is worth keeping in mind that these flights took place during
the same period that Gates had a documented relationship with Ghislaine’s sister
Isabel.

In addition, in the 1990s, Myhrvold traveled with Epstein to Russia alongside
Esther Dyson, a digital technology consultant who has been called “the most
influential woman in all the computer world”? She currently has close ties to
Google as well as the DNA testing company 23and-me and is a member of and
agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum. Dyson later stated that the
meeting with Epstein had been planned by Myhrvold. The meeting appears to
have taken place in 1998, based on information posted on Dyson's social media
accounts.

One photo taken during the trip features Dyson and Epstein, with a time
stamp indicating April 28, 1998, posing with Pavel Oleynikov, who appears to
have been an employee of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center.” In that photo,
they are standing in front of the house of the late Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet
nuclear scientist and dissident, who is alleged to have had ties to US intelligence.
Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were supporters of Zionist causes.2°

The photos were taken in Sarov, where the Russian Federal Nuclear Center is
based. That same day, another photo was taken that shows Epstein inside a
classroom full of teens, apparently also in Sarov, given the time stamp.” Notably,

about a year before Epstein’s visit, this particular nuclear research facility was a
source of controversy in the US as it had imported four US-made supercomputers
from the company Silicon Graphics, “setting off a US criminal investigation and
attempts in Congress to reverse [a] Clinton administration decision that relaxed
computer export controls”? The company had not obtained the required export
license before the sale and (somewhat unbelievably) claimed they didn’t know
that their customer was affiliated with Russia’s nuclear weapons program.”

Notably, prior to the scandals emergence, Silicon Graphics’ CEO, Ed
McCracken, had been “a White House regular, hobnobbing with Bill Clinton and
Al Gore” and had co-chaired Clinton’s National Information Infrastructure
Advisory Council. Silicon Graphics and Microsoft had worked in close
partnership since 1991 and had deepened that relationship by forming a “strategic
alliance” in December 1997, a few months before Epstein and Myhrvold visited
Sarov in a trip affiliated with Microsoft Russiat®%.

As previously discussed in chapter 16, many of the covert and illicit activities
behind Fostergate and Chinagate were related to efforts to alter US export
controls as it related to sensitive technology being sent abroad, specifically to
Russia and China. Those efforts specifically targeted the Commerce Department.
In the case of Silicon Graphics, it was the Commerce Department, heavily
targeted by foreign espionage activity, which was tasked with investigating the
company’s activities‘ Reporting at the time noted that the Commerce
Department’s export control system, by that point, amounted only to an “honor
system,”123

Notably, Silicon Graphics had, shortly before the sale to the Russian Federal
Nuclear Center in Sarov, acquired supercomputer firm Cray Research, whose
founder, Seymour Cray, had previously worked for Control Data Corporation
(CDC). CDC’s ties to Edwin Wilson, the Soviet Union, Robert Maxwell, and
technology transfers were detailed mainly in chapter 9.

In addition, regarding supercomputers, it is worth noting that Epstein had
many connections to the one-time main competitor to Cray Research — Thinking
Machines Corporation. Thinking Machines had been a major contractor for the
Pentagons DARPA. Epstein was particularly close to Thinking Machines co-
founder Danny Hillis as well as other key figures associated with the company,
such as Artificial Intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, who Virginia Giuffre alleged

was involved with abusing minors that Epstein trafficked, including herself.12

Another Thinking Machines associate who would later have considerable ties to
Epstein is geneticist Eric Lander. Lander served as president Biden’s top
science adviser until he was forced to resign in early 2022 over harassment
allegations and, prior to joining the Biden White House, Epstein had claimed to
be a major patron of Lander’s research.122

Another photo taken by Dyson, one without a visible time stamp but with a
caption stating the photo was taken “at Microsoft Russia in Moscow” in April
1998, shows Nathan Myhrvold. Dyson's caption further states, “This was the
beginning of a three-week trip during which Nathan and a variety of hangers-on
(including a bodyguard) explored the state of post-Soviet science”! Epstein
appears to be one of the “hangers-on, given the photographs, dates, and the
described purpose of the trip.

Myhrvold and Epstein apparently had more in common than an interest in
Russian scientific advances. When Myhrvold left Microsoft to cofound
Intellectual Ventures, Vanity Fair reported that he had received Epstein at the
firm's office with “young girls” in tow who were described as “Russian models.)
A source close to Myhrvold and cited by Vanity Fair claimed that Myhrvold spoke
openly about borrowing Epstein’s jet and staying at his residences in Florida and
New York. Vanity Fair also noted that Myhrvold has been accused of having sex
with minors trafficked by Epstein and is named in court documents in that regard
alongside George Mitchell and Bill Richardson. H?

In addition, a former colleague of Myhrvold’s at Microsoft later developed her
own ties to Epstein. Linda Stone, who joined Microsoft in 1993 and worked
directly under Myhrvold, eventually became a Microsoft vice president. She
introduced Epstein to Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Epstein’s first arrest. “He
has a tainted past, but Linda assures me that he’s awesome,’ Ito later said in an
email to three MIT staffers.142 In Epstein’s black book of contacts, there are
several phone numbers for Stone, and her emergency contact is listed as Kelly
Bovino, a former model and alleged Epstein co-conspirator. After Epstein’s 2019
arrest, it emerged that Epstein had “directed” Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the
MIT Media Lab in 2014.45 Epstein also allegedly secured a $5 million donation
from his associate Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign his post as the
lab’s director shortly after Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

EPSTEIN’S EDGE

QO- of Epsteins main entries into elite circles of scientific academia, and

specifically Big Tech, was through the Edge Group, an exclusive
organization of intellectuals “redefining who and what we are” that was created by
John Brockman.* Brockman, a self-described “cultural impresario” and noted
literary agent, is best known for his deep ties to the art world in the late 1960s,
though lesser known are his various “management consulting” gigs for the
Pentagon and White House during that same period. Edge, which the Guardian
once called “the world’s smartest website,’ is an exclusive online symposium
affiliated with what Brockman calls “the Third Culture” H6

According to an entry on Edge’s website written by Brockman, the “Third
Culture” consists of scientists and other thinkers who “are taking the place of the
traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meaning of our lives,
redefining who and what we are” as well as those “who have tremendous influence
on the emerging communication revolution surrounding the growth of the
Internet and the Web? =Z “Emerging out of the third culture,” Brockman writes,
“is a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of
complexity, of evolution.”

Regarding Edge’s membership, Brockman openly acknowledged to the
Guardian that Edge was “elitist,” but added that he meant elitist “in the good sense
of an open elite, based on meritocracy? H8 However, the validity of Edge’s
“meritocracy” is debatable given Epstein’s long presence in the Edge community.
When asked why Edge’s membership was so exclusive and elite, Brockman stated
the following: “The problem with a discussion that uses the word ‘elites’ is that the
word is automatically perceived as a pejorative. But that’s not how I feel about it at
all. Elites are a problem if they’re closed and exclusive. Elites that are open,
inclusive and based on merit can be nurturing. Also, members of elites give one
another permission to be great.”

Brockman has long hobnobbed with the elite since his early career, when he
was already “a master of serving up New York Bohemia in a palatable way for
investors and businessmen” H? His ability to market “cutting-edge” art to not just
the ultra-wealthy, but to corporations, established him “as a consultant who could
sell his services to anyone”? He would float between the corporate and art

worlds, as well as to and from Washington, DC for consulting jobs with the US
military and the White House, throughout the 1960s. In 1969, he would also
publish the first of his own books, By the late John Brockman, which reflected on
Brockman’s interest in transhumanism and his interest in “cybernetics” and the
“comparative study of brains and computer systems? +4

He founded his eponymous literary agency in 1973, which flourished due to
his vast array of contacts, knack for securing large advances, and his reputation as
“a networker’s networker”? His style rubbed many in the industry the wrong
way, with journalist James Gorman writing in 1997 that “Editors and other agents
who deal with Mr. Brockman or compete with him, complain, off the record,
about quickie book proposals, overblown advances and books that do not come in
on time or in good shape”! Nonetheless, Brockman is credited with making
scientists’ books marketable to the masses and significantly raising how much
money “celebrity” scientists make off of their book sales, regardless of whether
they are represented by Brockman.

At the dawn of the 1980s, Brockman began to merge his business with
interests in the nascent software industry. He declared himself the first “software
agent” in anticipation of the “future gold rush” and sold the word processing
program of his first client for $1 million. His biggest break in this area came soon
when, in 1983, he sold the Whole Earth Software Catalog for $1.3 million. Just as
in the literary world, he eventually angered major figures in tech like Bill Gates for
“poaching” software authors, leading Brockman to remark that the Microsoft co-
founder “is not a fan of mine,” though he added that this was at “the beginning of
the personal computer revolution and I’ve been at the center of it ever since” 24

In this milieu, Brockman began hosting an annual event, originally dubbed
“the Millionaires’ Dinner,” in 1985, which matched some of the biggest names in
Big Tech with potential benefactors. According to Brockman, major partnerships
and deals in the tech world were being made at the event, stating that “In the
beginning, it was very consequential; there was heavy stuff going down, alliances
coming and going about browsers...”/22 However, “once people had their jets
parked outside,’ meaning Silicon Valley leadership had become more showy with
their quickly growing wealth, “it got upgraded to the Billionaires’ Dinner.”

Shortly before Brockman began hosting these annual events, Charles and
Herbert Allen of Allen & Co. - linked to organized crime, Earl Brian, Leslie
Wexner’s mentors and others - began hosting the Allen & Co. Sun Valley

Conference in 1983, which has since been described as a “billionaire summer
camp” that, like Brockman’s event, regularly attracts the elite of Silicon Valley.12°

In the early 1990s, Brockman played an interesting role in a 1994 FBI
investigation into whether Soviet intelligence had recruited a Carter
administration official that allegedly passed state secrets on to Moscow. The
investigation was spurred by the accounts of a former Soviet spy in an
unpublished manuscript that Brockman had obtained.

In February 1993, former senior KGB official Valentin Aksilenko met with
American businesswoman Brenda Lipson, who had “befriended Mr. Aksilenko on
one of his Washington tours when the KGB official was working under the cover
of a commercial attaché to the Soviet Embassy,” according to the New York
Times. Lipson had sought Aksilenko out for an interview, which resulted in
Aksilenko “abruptly” asking if she could help publish a novel “written by a friend.”
Lipson agreed to help find the book a publisher and, through a mutual friend,
passed the manuscript onto John Brockman. Brockman agreed to publish and,
sometime between February and April, the manuscript “wound its way through
the world of publishing to the Central Intelligence Agency.”

In April 1993, Aksilenko and his “friend,” former KGB agent Yuri Shvets,
traveled to the US and spent a weekend at Brockman’s Connecticut farm and
subsequently sold the book to Simon & Schuster. Right after concluding their
meeting with Brockman, Aksilenko and Shvets traveled to Virginia, telling friends
they wanted to “revisit some of their old haunts” in Virginia. In reality, they
clandestinely met with FBI counterintelligence agents and became government
informants. Soon after these meetings, the two former KGB agents returned to
Moscow only to travel back to the US just months later, settling in suburban
Virginia, a common destination for foreign assets of US intelligence.

The whole affair was obviously strange, with the New York Times noting that
“the FBI's willingness to allow its informers to undertake the writing project” was
odd given that the FBI officials had publicly expressed their worry that
“disclosures prompted by the book might compromise their investigation” #8
However, the FBI did not interfere with or attempt to block the book's
publication. Also odd is the fact that the FBI admitted that it did “not know if
these events actually happened, and some officials are skeptical.’ In addition,
Shvets’ previous comments about a separate incident had been deemed not
credible by prominent former and current intelligence officials.

Brockman’ role in this episode is notable, as it appears that his Washington
connections (due to his past consulting for the US military and White House)
were utilized to somehow pass the manuscript along to the CIA, which may have
led to the FBI counterintelligence meeting with Aksilenko and Shvets
immediately following their time with Brockman. Brockman’s apparent passing of
the manuscript to the CIA raises the possibility that Brockman may have done so
in other instances, especially if he possessed a deeper relationship with the agency.
It is true that some other espionage-linked figures explored in this book,
specifically Robert Maxwell, were intimately involved in science-focused
publishing, not unlike Brockman.

The potential CIA tie is also significant for another reason, as Brockman and
the intelligence-linked Epstein became closely connected around this time. In
1995, Brockman was the literary agent of physicist Murray Gell-Mann and had
originally sold Gell-Mann’s book, The Quark and the Jaguar, to Bantam for
$550,000. Gell-Mann only managed to produce a partial manuscript, which
Bantam rejected. Brockman scrambled to try and resell the book, which he
eventually did to W.H. Freeman for $50,000. While these sums are considerable
alone, additional financing for the book was provided by Epstein. Gell-Mann’s
book thanks Epstein for his financial support.” Given the subsequent and close
relationship between Epstein and Brockman/Edge, it is highly likely that Epstein’s
support of Gell-Mann, at a time when the future of his book hung in the balance,
had been arranged between Brockman and Epstein.

That year, Brockman also released his treatise on the Third Culture and
founded what was called the Reality Club soon after with physicist Heinz Pagels.
Pagels died a year later in 1996 and their Reality Club then became known as
Edge.132

Three years later, in 1999, Brockman’s Edge officially rebranded the
Millionaires’ Dinner to the Billionaires’ Dinner, though it was formally known as
the Edge Annual Dinner.1*! The Edge website describes the dinner as offering an
opportunity for conversation between the “leading third culture intellectuals of
our time,’ the majority of whom are often Brockman’s clients, as well as “the
founders of Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Space X,
Skype, and Twitter.” Edge asserts that it is this “remarkable gathering of
outstanding minds” who are “rewriting our global culture.”

In writing about the dinner on the Edge website, Brockman divides many of
its attendees into two categories first mentioned by physicist Freeman Dyson: the
“computer wizards,’ the tech billionaires who dominate Silicon Valley’s most
successful companies, and the “biology wizards,’ scientists and thinkers whom
Brockman refers to as “a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as
Blake and Byron wrote verses.”+** As an active member of Edge, Jeffrey Epstein,
beginning around the time Bill Clinton left office and picking up considerably
after his first arrest, courted and financed (and potentially blackmailed) both
varieties of Edge’s “wizards.”

Epstein’s ties to Edge, and to Brockman, are considerable, with Epstein having
funded $638,000 out of a total of $857,000 donations raised by Edge from 2001
to 2017. During this period, there were several years where Epstein was Edge’s
only donor.“3 Epstein stopped giving in 2015 and that was incidentally the same
year that Edge decided to discontinue its annual Billionaires’ dinner tradition. In
addition, the only award Edge has ever given out, the $100,000 Edge of
Computation prize, was awarded once in 2005 to Quantum computing pioneer
David Deutsch and was funded entirely by Epstein.

While he bankrolled Edge and Brockman, Epstein was photographed at the
first and second Billionaires’ dinners in 1999 and 2000 and was mentioned in a
published summary of the 2004 dinner. BuzzFeed reported in 2019 that Epstein
also attended Edge events after his first arrest and as recently as 2011. Epstein is
likely to have been present at several other Billionaires’ dinners because his
accomplice and Ghislaine Maxwell’s then-“‘assistant,” Sarah Kellen, was
photographed with Brockman at Edge’s Billionaires’ dinner in 2002 and again in
2003 at Edge’s “science dinner,’ which replaced the Billionaires’ dinner that year,
alongside John Brockman’s son, Max.

On the heels of the first Billionaire’s dinner and just before he began heavily
funding Edge, Jeffrey Epstein created the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation in 2000,
which would be the main vehicle for his science-focused “philanthropy” that
would lead him to fund prominent individual scientists and develop close ties
with leading academic institutions, specifically MIT and Harvard. Most of those
scientists were also clients of Brockman as well as members of the Edge
community.

In addition, several individuals mentioned in this chapter in connection with
Epstein - Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, Joi Ito, Esther Dyson, and Bill Gates -

were all members of the Edge Foundation community (Edge.org website),
alongside several other Silicon Valley icons.*** Since the Epstein scandal, regular
attendees of the Billionaires’ Dinner (i.e. the Edge annual dinner), have referred to
the event as an “influence operation.’ If one follows the money, it appears it was an
influence operation largely benefitting one man, Jeftrey Epstein, and his network.

While this does not mean that everyone involved with Edge or with
Brockman was targeted by Epstein, it certainly gave him the network and the
cover to target and cultivate specific, prominent figures in Silicon Valley and in
academia, and it should be considered a key component of Epstein’s broader
influence operations during this period. Indeed, it may have been through Edge
that Epstein gained privileged access to the elite of “Big Tech.”

Before his 2019 arrest, Epstein had attempted to re-brand as a tech
investor/entrepreneur. Indeed, in the lead-up to his most recent arrest, Jeffrey
Epstein appeared to have been attempting to rebrand as a “tech investor,” as he had
done interviews with several journalists about technology investing in the months
before he was hit with federal sex trafficking charges.1** Similarly, after Epstein’s
first arrest, Ghislaine Maxwell began to also schmoozing key networks in Silicon
Valley, as seen by her attendance at the 2011 holiday party of Silicon Valley
venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.4°

For example, Jessica Lessin, editor-in-chief of The Information, told Business
Insider that a journalist working for The Information had interviewed Epstein a
month before his most recent arrest because “he was believed to be an investor in
venture capital funds.’84 However, Lessin claimed that the interview was not
“newsworthy” and said the site had no plans to publish its contents. Business
Insider claimed that the way the interviews with Epstein had been arranged
“suggests that someone in Silicon Valley may have been trying to help Epstein
connect with reporters.”88

Around this same time, Epstein had also told journalist James Stewart that he
had “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information on Silicon Valley’s elite
and told Stewart that these top figures in the American tech industry “were
hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs.” Epstein also told Stewart that
he had “witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex” and
claimed to know “details about their supposed sexual proclivities.” +2

Whether through Edge or another avenue, there is a strong case to be made

that Epstein had blackmail on powerful Silicon Valley figures. Though it is

unknown exactly which Silicon Valley figures were most connected to Epstein and
which tech executives were potentially being blackmailed by him, it is known that
Epstein associated with several prominent tech executives, including founders of
Big Techs most important firms, such as Google, Tesla/SpaceX, Microsoft and
Facebook.2

For instance, in 2019, Epstein claimed to be advising Tesla and Elon Musk,
who had been previously photographed with Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine
Maxwell. Epstein had also attended a dinner hosted by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman,
where Musk had allegedly introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg of
Facebook/Meta.“*+ Google’s Sergey Brin is known to have attended a dinner
hosted by Epstein at his New York residence where Donald Trump was also in
attendance. In addition, Ghislaine Maxwell was reportedly close to Amazon's Jeff
Bezos who she referred to as her “pal” and who invited Maxwell to exclusive

events he hosted

Several of these companies whose founders had some
Epstein-Maxwell connection, including Google, Microsoft, SpaceX, and Amazon,
are also major contractors to the US government, the military, and/or the
intelligence community.

Around the same time he began to cultivate the titans of Big Tech, Epstein’s
links to celebrity scientists also became obvious. In 2002, he flew cognitive
psychologist Steven Pinker, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and
“philosopher of the mind” Daniel Dennett to that year’s TED conference. The trip
in Epstein’s private jet, which also included Brockman and his wife Katinka
Matson, was ritzy enough to receive a mention in the New York Times’ summary of
the 2002 TED conference, which spoke of the “mink and sable throws” that
adorned the plane as well as the group’s “high-altitude lunch catered by Le Cirque
200018 The article refers to Epstein as a “financial adviser to billionaires.”

Some scientists that Epstein began to cultivate after the creation of his Jeffrey
Epstein VI Foundation have courted controversy for their ties to eugenics or
eugenicists. For instance, Epstein was a long-time patron of George Church, a
Harvard geneticist who was also connected to Edge. Church has been accused of
promoting eugenics as well as unethical human experimentation, such as using
human women as surrogates for “resurrected” embryos of extinct species.** In
addition, another scientists allegedly funded by Epstein, Eric Lander,
controversially praised James Watson, a geneticist and a notorious eugenicist who
had stated his belief that people of African descent have genetically inferior

intelligence on numerous occasions prior to Landers complimentary

statements.48

Epstein’s own interest in eugenics was the subject of several mainstream
reports after his death. In the early 2000s, around the same time he began to court
these top “celebrity” scientists including Church, Epstein began to tell friends and
scientists that he wanted to impregnate 20 women at a time at his Zorro Ranch
property. Some prominent scientists later told the New York Times that
Epstein’s social events and outings may have been an opportunity for Epstein “to
screen attractive women with impressive academic credentials as potential
mothers for his children.’*“4 Using the Zorro property, Epstein reportedly sought
to “seed the human race with his DNA” due to his interest in controlled breeding
and eugenics.

Some Epstein accusers, like Virginia Giuffre, have alleged that Epstein and
Maxwell had asked her to serve as a “surrogate” for what they said would be their
child.48 In addition, another victim who testified under the name Carolyn (see
chapter 18), reported seeing pictures of Ghislaine Maxwell nude and pregnant.
It is unknown what became of the pregnancy, but Epstein’s apparent interest in
impregnating women with his DNA as well as his interest in genetics and eugenics
suggest that these episodes, as well as his ambitions at the Zorro Ranch property,
deserve greater scrutiny.

A TALE OF TWO BILLS

hile he courted top scientists and tech moguls, including a few alleged

eugenicists, Epstein — as discussed in the previous chapter — had become
intimately involved in planning key aspects of major “philanthropies” that would
later become major drivers of global health policy in the developing world: the
Clinton Foundation and, later, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It is worth exploring the ties between the “philanthropic” endeavors of Bill
Gates and Bill Clinton in the early 2000s, given Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s
ties to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative during that
period.

Despite tensions arising from the Clinton administration’s pursuit of
Microsofts monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had
thawed by April 2000, when Gates attended the White House “Conference on the
New Economy.”}®2 Attendees besides Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn
Forester (now Lynn Forester de Rothschild) and then Treasury Secretary Larry
Summers, whose ties to Epstein were discussed in chapter 14.4°4+ Another
attendee was White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, whose special
assistant Mark Middleton had met with Epstein numerous times at the Clinton
White House. Another participant in the conference was Janet Yellen, Biden’s
current Secretary of the Treasury.

Gates spoke at a conference panel entitled “Closing the Global Divide:
Health, Education and Technology.” He discussed how the mapping of the human
genome would result in a new era of technological breakthroughs and discussed
the need to offer internet access to everyone to close the digital divide and allow
the “new” internet-based economy to take shape. At the time, Gates was backing a
company, along with American Telecom billionaire Craig McCaw, that hoped to
establish a global internet service provider monopoly through a network of low-
orbit satellites.!3 That company, Teledesic, shut down between 2002 and 2003
and is credited as being the inspiration for Elon Musk’s Starlink.+54

Bill Clinton and Bill Gates entered the world of philanthropy around the same
time, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launching in 2000 and the
Clinton Foundation following in 2001. Not only that, but Wired described the two
foundations as being “at the forefront of a new era in philanthropy, in which

decisions — often referred to as investments — are made with the strategic precision
demanded of business and government, then painstakingly tracked to gauge their
success” 155

Yet, critics and supporters alike, as noted in the previous chapter, challenged
that these foundations engaged in “philanthropy” and asserted that calling them
such was causing “the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term”! The
Huffington Post further noted that the Clinton Global Initiative (part of the
Clinton Foundation), the Gates Foundation, and a few similar organizations “all
point in the direction of blurring the boundaries between philanthropy, business,
and non-profits.” It is worth noting that several of Epstein’s own “philanthropic”
vehicles, such as the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, were also created just as this
new era in philanthropy was beginning.

Years after creating their foundations, Gates and Clinton have discussed how
they have “long bonded over their shared mission” of normalizing this new model
of philanthropy. Gates spoke to Wired in 2013 about “their forays into developing
regions” and “cites the close partnerships between their organizations” +7 In that
interview, Gates revealed that he had met Clinton before he had become
president, stating, “I knew him before he was president, I knew him when he was
president, and I know him now that he’s not president.’

Also in that interview, Clinton stated that after he left the White House he
sought to focus on two specific things. The first is the Clinton Health Access
Initiative (CHAI), which he stated exists “thanks largely to funding from the
Gates Foundation,” and the second is the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), “where
I try to build a global network of people to do their own thing.” Ira Magaziner,
who flew on Epstein’s plane alongside Clinton and Doug Band, was the key figure
behind the creation of CHAI and served as its CEO.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative first received an $11 million donation
from the Gates Foundation in 2009.158 Since then, the Gates Foundation has
donated more than $497 million to CHAI CHAI was initially founded in 2002
with the mission of tackling HIV/AIDS globally through “strong government
relationships” and addressing “market inefficiencies.“? As mentioned in the
previous chapter, Epstein was credited with helping shape Clinton’s HIV/AIDS
policies during that period, suggesting he was involved with the creation of CHAI,
as well as the Clinton Global Initiative. Notably, the Gates Foundation’s significant
donations began not long after CHAI’s expansion into malaria diagnostics and

treatments. In 2011, Tachi Yamada, the former president of the Gates
Foundation’s Global Health program, joined CHAI’s board alongside Chelsea
Clinton.

As previously noted in the last chapter, Epstein’s defense lawyers argued in
court in 2007 that Epstein had been “part of the original group that conceived of
the Clinton Global Initiative” which was first launched in 2005.16} The Gates
Foundation gave the CGI a total of $2.5 million between 2012 and 2013 in
addition to its massive donations to the CHAI and an additional $35 million to
the Clinton Foundation itself.4® In addition to the Gates Foundation donations,
Gates’s Microsoft has been intimately involved in other “philanthropic” projects
backed by Clinton.1%

In addition to these ties, Hillary Clinton established a partnership between
the Clinton Foundation oe the Gates Foundation in 2014 as part of the Clintons’

“No Ceilings” initiative“ That partnership sought to “gather and analyze data
about the status of women and girls’ participation around the world” and involved
the two foundations working “with leading technology partners to collect these
data and compile them.” Months before the partnership was announced, Gates
and Epstein met for dinner and discussed the Gates Foundation and philanthropy,
according to the New York Times.1® During Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful run for
president in 2016, both Bill and Melinda Gates were on her short list as potential
options for vice president. 1%

In addition, Epstein attempted to become involved in the Gates Foundation
directly, as seen by his efforts to convince the Gates Foundation to partner with
JPMorgan on a multibillion-dollar “global health charitable fund” that would have
resulted in hefty fees paid out to Epstein, who was very involved with JPMorgan at
the time.1®2 Though that fund never materialized, Epstein and Gates did discuss
Epstein becoming involved in Gates’s philanthropic efforts. Prior to this proposal
of a more direct role for Epstein, he had previously worked indirectly through
Gates, as he had “directed” Gates to donate to at least one organization — $2
million in 2014 to the MIT Media Lab.

Other Gates and Epstein meetings that took place between 2013 and 2014
have further underscored the importance Epstein apparently held in the world of
billionaire “philanthropy; with ae reportedly claiming that Epstein was his

“ticket” to winning a Nobel Prize.18 8 Norwegian media, however, reported in
October 2020 that Gates and Epstein had met the Nobel Committee chair, which

failed to make a splash in international media at the time+© It is worth asking if

Epstein managed to arrange such meetings with other individuals who also
coveted Nobel Prizes and if any such individuals later received those prizes. If
Epstein had such connections, it is unlikely that he would have used them only
once in the case of Bill Gates, given the vastness of his network, particularly in the
tech and science worlds.

The year 2013 is also when Bill and Melinda Gates together met with Epstein
at his New York residence, after which Melinda allegedly began asking her then-
husband to distance himself from Epstein.22 While the stated reason for this, in
the wake of the their divorce announcement in 2021, was that Melinda was put off
by Epstein’s past and his persona, it could potentially be related to other concerns
about Melinda's reputation and that of the foundation that shares her name.

Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates’ mansion systems engineer, Rick
Allen Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child
rape video collection, which contained over six thousand images and videos.
Despite the gravity of his crimes, when Jones was arrested at the Gates’ mansion a
year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was merely ordered “to stay away
from children,” according to local media reports. From Melinda's perspective,
this scandal, combined with Bill Gates’s growing association with then-convicted
pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a major threat to the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation’s reputation, well before Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

Around this same time, Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar Project, which officially
supported UN Sustainable Development Goals as they relate to the world’s
oceans, made a $1.25 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative as part
of an effort to form a Sustainable Oceans Alliance. TerraMar shut down shortly
after Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

Notably, Ghislaine’s TerraMar Project was in many ways the successor to
Isabel Maxwell's failed Blue World Alliance, which was also ostensibly focused on
the world’s oceans. Blue World Alliance was set up by Isabel and her now
deceased husband Al Seckel, who had hosted a “scientific conference” on Epstein’s
island. The Blue World Alliance also went under the name the Globalsolver
Foundation, and Xavier Malina, Christine Maxwell’s son, was listed as
Globalsolver’s liaison to the Clinton Foundation.“ He was previously an intern
at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Malina later worked in the Obama administration at the Office of White
House Personnel. + He now works for Google. It is also worth noting that during
this same period, Isabel Maxwell’s son, Alexander Djerassi, was chief of staff at the
Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Hillary Clinton-run State Department,

where he would have overseen key policies of interest to Israel.12°

GATES SCIENCE AND EPSTEIN SCIENCE

hile the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation intermingled and

shared ties to Epstein and Maxwell, it also appears that Epstein had
significant influence over two of the most prominent science advisers to Bill Gates
over the last fifteen years —- Melanie Walker and Boris Nikolic.

As detailed in chapter 18, Melanie Walker, now a celebrated neurosurgeon,
met Jeffrey Epstein in 1992 soon after she graduated from college, when he offered
her a Victorias Secret modeling job.} She then stayed at a New York apartment
building associated with Epstein’s trafficking operations during visits to New York,
but it is unclear how long she stayed there or at other Epstein-owned properties.
After she graduated from medical school in 1998, she became Epstein’s science
adviser for at least a year. Shortly afterwards, she grew close to Prince Andrew and
was reportedly “given” to him when he visited Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property.

After leaving Epstein’s employ as his science adviser (and as an apparent
occasional companion for Prince Andrew), Walker moved to Seattle and began
living with then Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a board

178 Andreessen Horowitz

partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
notably backs Carbyne911, the Israel intelligence-linked pre-crime start-up
funded by Epstein and his close associate, former prime minister of Israel Ehud
Barak. It is unclear when, how, and under what circumstances Walker met
Sinofsky.

After moving to Seattle to be with Sinofsky and after a brief stint as a
“practitioner in the developing world” in China with the World Health
Organization, Walker was hired as a senior program officer by the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation in 2006. Given that the main feature of Walker's resume at the
time was having been a science adviser to another wealthy “philanthropist,” Jeffrey
Epstein, her hire by the Gates Foundation for this critical role further underscores
how Bill Gates, at the very least, not only knew who Epstein was but knew enough
about his scientific interests and investments to want to hire Walker at that time.

Walker went on to become deputy director for Global Development as well as
a deputy director of Special Initiatives at the foundation.%2 According to the
Rockefeller Foundation, where she is now a fellow, Walker later advised Gates on
issues pertaining to neurotechnology and brain science for Gates’s secretive

company bgC3, which Gates originally registered as a think tank under the name
Carillon Holdings.1®+ According to federal filings, bgC3’s focus areas were
“scientific and technological services,’ “industrial analysis and research,” and
“design and development of computer hardware and software” 182

During her time at the Gates Foundation, Walker introduced Boris Nikolic,
Gates’s science adviser, to Epstein. Today, Melanie Walker is the co-chair of the
World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain
Science, having previously been named a WEF Young Global Leader. She also
advises the World Health Organization, which is heavily funded by and closely
linked to Bill Gates’s “philanthropy”

In 2016, while at the WEF, Walker wrote an article entitled “Healthcare in
2030: Goodbye Hospital, Hello Home-spital,’ in which she discusses how
wearable devices, brain-machine interfaces, and injectable/swallowable robotic
“medicines” will be the norm by 2030.18 Years before efforts to change health
care in just this way were as visible as they today, Walker wrote that, while the
dystopian scenario she was painting “sounds crazy [,] most of these technologies
are either almost ready for prime time, or in development.’

In the case of Boris Nikolic, after being introduced to Epstein through Walker,
he attended a 2011 meeting with Gates and Epstein where he was photographed
alongside James Staley, then a senior JPMorgan executive, and Larry Summers.+84
Nikolic was chief adviser for science and technology to Bill Gates at the time,
advising both the Gates Foundation and bgC3.1®° According to the mainstream
narrative, this is supposed to be the first time that Gates and Epstein had ever met.
In addition, this may have been the meeting where Epstein pitched the joint Gates
Foundation-JP-Morgan “global health charitable fund.’

In 2014, Nikolic “waxed enthusiastic” about Epstein’s supposed penchant for
financial advice ahead of a public offering for a gene-editing company that Nikolic
had a $42 million stake in.+8 Notably, both Nikolic and Epstein were clients of
the same group of bankers at JPMorgan, with Bloomberg later reporting that
Epstein regularly helped those bankers attract wealthy new clients.

In 2016, Nikolic co-founded Biomatics Capital, which invests in health-
related companies at “the convergence of genomics and digital data” that are
“enabling the development of superior therapeutics, diagnostics, and delivery
models.”482 Nikolic founded Biomatics with Julie Sunderland, formerly the
director of the Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund.

At least three of the companies backed by Biomatics - Qihan Biotech,
eGenesis, and Editas - were co-founded by George Church, the Harvard
geneticist with deep ties to Epstein and Edge.+88 Biomatics’ investment in Qihan
Biotech is no longer listed on the Biomatics website.82 Church’s Qihan Biotech
seeks to produce human tissues and organs inside pigs for transplantation into
humans, while eGenesis seeks to genetically modify pig organs for use in humans.
Editas produces CRISPR gene-editing “medicines” and is also backed by the
Gates Foundation as well as Google Ventures.122

After Epstein’s death in 2019, it was revealed that Nikolic had been named the
“successor executor” of Epstein’s estate, further suggesting he had very close ties to
Epstein, despite Nikolic’s claims to the contrary. After details of Epstein’s will were
made public, Nikolic declined to sign a form indicating his willingness to be

executor and did not ultimately serve in that role.

Endnotes

12
13

15
16

Nigel Rosser, “Andrew's Fixer; She’s the Daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's Manipulating
His Jetset Lifestyle,” Evening Standard (London), January 22, 2001,

THE-DAUGHTER-OF-ROBERT-MAXWELL-AND-1.pdf.

“Where Our Money Comes From,” BBC,
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7,2011, https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-20-million-to-
bbc-world-service-trust.

Whitney Webb, “Epstein Victim Maria Farmer Speaks With Whitney Webb, Full Phone Call -
Part 2,” The Last American Vagabond, May 26, 2020,

whitney-webb-full-phone-call-part-2/.

Whitney Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business: Espionage,’ Unlimited Hangout, July 15, 2020,
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espionage/.

Po Bronson, “On The Net, No One Knows You're a Maxwell,” Wired, February 1, 1999,
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Saskia Sissons, “Mysterious Business of the Queen of NY-Lon,’ Sunday Times (London),
November 12, 2000, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-

The Newsroom, “Misery in the Maxwell House,” The Scotsman, November 16, 2001,
https://www.scotsman.com/news/misery-maxwell-house-25 10066.

Bronson, “On The Net.”

CNET News staff, “MSN to Use McKinley Directory,’ CNET, December 18, 1995,
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Sharon Wrobel, “Serial Entrepreneur,’ The Jerusalem Post, August 24, 2006,
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2976079.php.

Bronson, “On The Net.”

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“The Full History of the Israel Start Up Nation.”

24

25

26

27

28

29

Whitney Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings,”
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jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/; Whitney Webb, “From ‘Spook Air’ to the ‘Lolita
Express’: The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship,’
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epstein-bill-clinton-relationship/.

Orr Hirschauge and Yoav Stoler, “Israel Blurs the Line Between Defense Apparatus and Local
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article/ex-pm-barak-gave-weinstein-info-on-israeli-firm-hired-to-fight-
accusations/0000017f-e6bb-df2c-a1fffefb60db0000.

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“Ed Mlavsky.’

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26PersonName%3DIAN%2520BONNER,

“Cyren LTD. SEC Filing.”

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f6fb-d5bd-a17f-f6fb5de60000.

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“Paul Allen during AmfAR’s ‘Cinema Against AIDS Cannes’ Benefit,” Getty Images, May 20,
2004, https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/paul-allen-during-amfars-cinema-
against-aids-cannes-benefit-news-photo/107278856; Johnny Vedmore, “Epstein &
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september-1-2002-the-secret-senators-and-the-wexner-war-on-iraq.

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ou 2.html.
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qz=cache:Wqex6Jwe6C4J:www.maxwell-
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4

trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed.

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“Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s Interactions With the Massachusetts Institute of

200117.

112 “Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s Interactions With the Massachusetts Institute of
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113 Kat Tenbarge and Benjamin Goggin, “Bill Gates Made Donations to MIT through Jeffrey
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epstein-mit-donations-ronan-farrow-2019-9,

114 “About Edge.Org,’ Edge, https://www.edge.org/about-edgeorg.

115 “John Brockman,’ Dazed, July 8, 2012,
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116 John Naughton, “John Brockman: The Man Who Runs the World's Smartest Website,’ The
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117 “About Edge.Org.’

118 Naughton, “John Brockman.’

119 Dazed, “John Brockman.”

120 Andrew Brown, “The Hustler,’ The Guardian, April 29, 2005,
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121 James Gorman, “Nimble Deal-Maker For Stars Of Science,’ New York Times, October 14, 1997,
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122 Evgeny Morozov, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler,’ The New Republic, August 22, 2019,

123 Gorman, “Nimble Deal-Maker.’

124 Dazed, John Brockman.”

125 Dazed, “John Brockman.”

126 Soo Kim, “Sun Valley Conference 2021—Billionaire Summer Camp Explained and Who Is
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127 John Markoff and David Johnston, “U.S. Investigates Whether K.G.B. Recruited Ex-White
House Aide,’ New York Times, April 9, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/09/us/us-
investigates-whether-kgb-recruited-ex-white-house-aide.html.

128 Markoff and Johnston, “U.S. Investigates.’

129 James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped
to Seed Human Race With His DNA,’ New York Times, July 31, 2019,

130 Dazed, “John Brockman.”

131 “The Edge ‘Billionaires’ Dinner’ 2015,’ Edge, March 18, 2015,
https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-2015.

132 “The Edge ‘Billionaires’ Dinner’ 2015”

133 Kayla Kibbe, “Edge Foundation President May Have Been Jeffrey Epstein’s Connection to
Intellectual Elite,” InsideHook, August 23, 2019,

have-been-jeffrey-epsteins-connection-to-intellectual-elite.

134

135

136

137
138
139

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142

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144

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147

148

https://www.edge.org/memberbio/esther_dyson; “Bill Gates,” Edge,
https://www.edge.org/memberbio/bill gates.

John Cook, “Jeffrey Epstein Was Meeting with Silicon Valley Reporters before His Arrest,
‘rambling’ about All the People He Knew in Tech,’ Business Insider, August 13, 2019,
death-2019-8.

Aaron Holmes, “Former Silicon Valley VC Says Ghislaine Maxwell Attended an Investor Party
in 2011 despite Reports ‘about Her Supplying Underage Girls for Sex,” Business Insider, July
6, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ghislaine-maxwell-attended-kleiner-perkins-vc-
party-alleges-ellen-pao-2020-7.

Cook, “Jeffrey Epstein Was Meeting with Silicon Valley Reporters before His Arrest.’

Cook, “Jeffrey Epstein Was Meeting with Silicon Valley Reporters before His Arrest.’

James B. Stewart, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People,” New
epstein-interview.html.

Sarah McBride, “Epstein Arrest Leaves Top Technology Figures Racing to Distance
Themselves,’ Bloomberg, July 31, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-
McBridge, “Epstein Arrest Leaves Top Technology Figures Racing.’

Kate Briquelet, “Ghislaine Maxwell Bragged About ‘Pal’ Jeff Bezos,” The Daily Beast, July 23,
2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ghislaine-maxwell-bragged-about-pal-jeff-bezos;
Ebony Bowden, “Ghislaine Maxwell Attended Jeff Bezos’ Secretive Writers’ Retreat: Report,’
attended-jeff-bezos-secretive-writers-retreat-report/.

Patricia Leigh Brown, “3 Days In the Future,’ New York Times, February 28, 2002,

Blake Montgomery, “Epstein-Funded Scientist George Church Is Creating a Genetics-Based
Dating App,’ The Daily Beast, December 10, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/epstein-
Fiona Macrae, “Wanted: ‘Adventurous Woman’ to Give Birth to Neanderthal Man - Harvard
Professor Seeks Mother for Cloned Cave Baby,’ Mail Online, January 20, 2013,
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265402/Adventurous-human-woman-wanted-
birth-Neanderthal-man-Harvard-professor.html.

Julia Belluz, “DNA Scientist James Watson Has a Remarkably Long History of Sexist, Racist
Public Comments,’ Vox, January 15, 2019,
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist.

Stewart, Goldstein, and Silver-Greenberg, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With
His DNA”

Stewart, Goldstein, and Silver-Greenberg, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With
His DNA”

“Virginia Roberts Fled Epstein after Being Asked to Have Surrogate,’ Mail Online, March 21,

Ghislaine-Maxwell-asked-surrogate-baby.html.

149

150
151
152
153
154
155

156
157
158

159

160

161

162
163

164

165

166

167

Sravasti Dasgupta, “Accuser Says She Saw Photos of Ghislaine Maxwell Nude and Pregnant
at Epstein’s Home,’ The Independent, December 8, 2021,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/ghislaine-maxwell-pregnant-
photo-epstein-b1971772.html.

“Conference on the New Economy Panelists,’ The White House, April 5, 2000,
https://clintonwhitehouseS5.archives.gov/WH/New/html/20000405-b.html.

“Conference on the New Economy Panelists.’

Webb, “From ‘Spook Air’ to the ‘Lolita Express.”

Robert Cyran, “SpaceX Is a Throwback to the 1990s,” DealBook, January 21, 2015,
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/spacex-is-a-throwback-to-the-1990s/,

Cyran, “SpaceX Is a Throwback.’

Steven Levy, “Bill Gates and President Bill Clinton on the NSA, Safe Sex, and American
Exceptionalism,’ Wired, November 12, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/11/bill-gates-bill-
clinton-wired/.

Levy, “Bill Gates and President Bill Clinton.’

“Committed Grants,’ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=clinton

“How We Work,’ Clinton Health Access Initiative, https://www.clintonhealthaccess.org/how-
we-work/,

“About Us,” Clinton Health Access Initiative, https://www.clintonhealthaccess.org/about-
us/#history

Jack Crowe, “Epstein’s Lawyer Claimed the Alleged Pedophile Helped Devise the Clinton

alleged-pe-dophile-223701676.html.
“Committed Grants,’ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nancy Gohring, “Bill Clinton Drops In at Microsoft to Say Thanks,’ PCWorld, November 2,
2007,

ticle.html.

“Clinton Foundation And Gates Foundation Partner To Measure Global Progress For Women
And Girls,’ Clinton Foundation, February 13, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161110141528/https://www.clintonfoundation.org/press-
releases/clinton-foundation-and-gates-foundation-partner-measure-global-progress-
women-and.

Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart, “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite
His Past,” New York Times, October 12, 2019,

Monica Nickelsburg, “Vice President Gates? WikiLeaks Emails Reveal Bill and Melinda Were
on Hillary Clinton's Short List,” GeekWire, October 18, 2016,
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/vice-president-gates-wikileaks-emails-reveal-bill-melinda-
hillary-clintons-short-list/.

Kate Briquelet and Pilar Melendez, “Bill Gates Praised Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s Lifestyle:
‘Kind of Intriguing,” The Daily Beast, October 12, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-

168

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173

174

175
176

177

178
179

180
181

182

Kate Briquelet and Lachlan Cartwright, “Bill Gates Thought Jeffrey Epstein Was His Ticket to
a Nobel Prize, Ex-Staffer Says,” The Daily Beast, May 18, 2021,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-gates-thought-jeffrey-epstein-was-his-ticket-to-a-
nobel-ex-staffer-says.

Tore Gjerstad and Gard Oterholm, “Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein met with Nobel Committee

committee-chair/2-1-885834.

Kate Briquelet and Lachlan Cartwright, “Melinda Gates Warned Bill About Jeffrey Epstein,’
The Daily Beast, May 7, 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/melinda-gates-warned-bill-
gates-about-jeffrey-epstein.

“Man Arrested at Bill Gates’ Estate for Reportedly Trading Child Porn,’ KIRO 7 News Seattle,
December 31, 2015, https://www.kiro7.com/news/man-arrested-bill-gates-estate-
reportedly-trading-/43531857/.

“Clinton Global Initiative,’ Clinton Foundation,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220805174405/https://www.clintonfoundation.org/progra
ms/leadership-public-service/clinton-global-initiative/.

“Globalsolver Foundation, Blue World Alliance in Tarzana, California,’ NonProfitFacts.com,

solver-Foundation.html.

Rudy Havenstein, Twitter post, April 10, 2021,

1381015795011047427; “Xavier Malina’s Email & Phone Number,’ SignalHire,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210410231719/https://web.archive.org/web/202010022048
16/https://www.signalhire.com/profiles/xavier-malina’s-email/53404874.

“Xavier Malina.”

“Alexander Djerassi,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, https://carnegieen-
dowment.org/experts/1088.

“The Rockefeller Foundation Announces Inaugural Cohort of Fellows,’ The Rockefeller
Foundation, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/rockefeller-foundation-
announces-inaugural-cohort-fellows/.

“Team,” Andreessen Horowitz, https://a16z.com/about/team/.

Kate Clark, “Former Israeli Prime Minister Helps Launch A16z-Backed Cyber Defense
Startup,’ Pitchbook, July 16, 2018, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/former-israeli-prime-
minister-helps-launch-a16z-backed-cyber-defense-startup.

“The Rockefeller Foundation Announces Inaugural Cohort of Fellows,’; “Bill Gates Is Back in
Business with BgC3,” Geek.com, December 4, 2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20191204112441/https://www.geek.com/news/bill-gates-is-
back-in-business-with-bgc3-606971/; Caroline Waxler, “Bill Gates Starts Mysterious New
Company Just In Time For Halloween,’ Business Insider, October 22, 2008,

in-time-for-halloween.
Waxler, “Bill Gates Starts Mysterious New Company.’

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

Melanie Walker, “Healthcare in 2030: Goodbye Hospital, Hello Home-Spital,” World Economic
Forum, November 11, 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/healthcare-in-

relationship-1590004.

Meghana Keshavan, “Science Advisor to Bill Gates Launches New Firm, Raising $150M Fund,’
MedCity News, April 19, 2016, https://medcitynews.com/2016/04/biomatics-capital-
partners-bill-gates/.

Briquelet and Cartwright, “Melinda Gates Warned Bill,”; Priscilla DeGregory, “Bill Gates’
Former Advisor Boris Nikolic Turns down Role as Executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s Estate,” New

boris-nikolic-turns-down-role-as-executor-of-jeffrey-epsteins-estate/.

“Transforming Health Care and Medicine, One Investment at a Time,’ Biomatics Capital,
https://biomaticscapital.com/.

“Portfolio,” Biomatics Capital, https://biomaticscapital.com/portfolio/; “About Us:
Leadership,” QIHAN BIOTECH, https://www.gihanbio.com/about#leadership; “George M.
Church - EGenesis Bio,’ eGenesis,
https://web.archive.org/web/20201201110141/https://www.egenesisbio.com/portfolio-
item/george-m-church/; Elizabeth Cooney, “A Terrific Choice’: George Church Salutes Fellow
CRISPR Pioneers’ Historic Nobel Win,” STAT, October 7, 2020,
https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/07/a-terrific-choice-george-church-salutes-fellow-
crispr-pioneers-historic-nobel-win/.

Yusuf Tuna, “Sequoia-Backed Qihan Biotech Raises 20 Million to Address China’s Organ
Shortage,’ EqualOcean, July 24, 2019, https://equalocean.com/news/201907241 1437,
David Crow, “Bill Gates Joins $120m Fundraising for Editas Medicine Gene Start-Up,’
Financial Times, August 10, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/bd0f94ae-3f79-11e5-b98b-
87¢7270955cf.

DeGregory, “Bill Gates’ Former Advisor Boris Nikolic Turns down Role.’

John Poindexter

CHAPTER 21

FROM PROMIS TO PALANTIR: THE
FUTURE OF BLACKMAIL

CARBYNE9YI11

C arbyne911, formerly Reporty, is an Israeli tech-start-up founded in 2014 that

promises to revolutionize how calls are handled by emergency service
providers, as well as by governments, corporations, and educational institutions.
Prior to Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in mid-2019, Carbyne had received high praise
from US and Israeli media, with Fox News hailing the company’s services as the
answer to the “aging 911 systems” in the US and the Jerusalem Post writing that the
company’s platform offers “hi-tech protection to social workers and school
principals” in the event of school shootings.t Other reports claimed that
Carbyne’s services result in “a 65% reduction in time-to-dispatch” for emergency
services.

Carbyne’s call-handling/crisis management platform has already been
implemented in several US counties and Latin American countries and the
company now boasts offices in not only the US but also in Mexico, the UK, and
Israel. Carbyne’s expansion to more emergency service provider networks in the
US is likely, given that federal legislation seeks to offer grants to upgrade 911 call
centers throughout the country with the very technology of which Carbyne is the
leading provider. One of the main lobby groups promoting this legislation, the
National Emergency Number Association (NENA), has a “strong relationship”
with Carbyne, according to Carbyne’s website.

Yet, what seemed like the inevitability of Carbyne’s widespread adoption in
the US hit a snag following the 2019 arrest and subsequent death of Jeffrey
Epstein. After his first arrest and light sentence for soliciting sex from a minor in
2007, Epstein had been tapped by former Israeli Prime Minister and former head
of Israeli military intelligence Ehud Barak to become a key financial backer of
Carbyne.

As a result of increased scrutiny into Epstein’s business activities and his ties to
Israel, particularly to Barak, Epstein’s connection to Carbyne was revealed and
extensively reported on by the independent media outlet Narativ, whose exposé
on Carbyne revealed not only some of the key intelligence connections of the
start-up company but also how the architecture of Carbyne’s product itself raises

“serious privacy concerns.”

After media scrutiny of Carbyne in the wake of Epstein’s death, its board and
executive team were shaken up dramatically, with the apparent goal of obfuscating
its intimate ties to Israel and Barak specifically. This is likely because the
intelligence links of Carbyne’s leadership at the time of Epstein’s arrest and death,
were considerable.> In addition to Barak — a former Israeli prime minister and
former head of Israeli military intelligence - who was then serving as Carbyne's
chairman, the company’s executive team were mainly former members of Israeli
intelligence, including the elite military intelligence group, Unit 8200. Also on the
board at the time was Nicole Junkermann, whose ties to Epstein have been
discussed in chapters 14 and 18.

Carbyne’s founding and current CEO, Amir Elichai, served in Unit 8200 and
had tapped former Unit 8200 commander and board member of AIPAC Pinchas
Buchris to serve as the company’s director and on its board.° In addition to
Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder, Lital Leshem, also served in Unit 8200 and
later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. As previously mentioned
in the last chapter, Black Cube is a known front for Israeli intelligence. The only
Carbyne co-founder that didn’t serve in Unit 8200 is Alex Dizengoff, who
previously worked for the office of Israel’s Prime Minister.2

Unit 8200 is an elite unit of the Israeli Intelligence corps that is part of the
IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and is involved mainly in signal
intelligence (i.e., surveillance), cyberwarfare, and code decryption. It is frequently
described as the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and Peter Roberts, senior research
fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, characterized the unit in an
interview with the Financial Times as “probably the foremost technical intelligence
agency in the world and stand[ing] on a par with the NSA in everything except
scale.”8

Notably, the NSA and Unit 8200 have collaborated on numerous projects,
most infamously on the Stuxnet virus as well as the Duqu malware. In addition,
the NSA is known to work with veterans of Unit 8200 in the private sector, such as
when the NSA hired two Israeli companies to create backdoors into all the major
U.S. telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Facebook,
Microsoft, and Google. Both of those companies, Verint and Narus, have top
executives with ties to Israeli intelligence; one of those companies, Verint
(formerly Comverse Infosys), has a history of aggressively spying on US
government facilities and was previously discussed in chapter 14.44 Unit 8200 is

also known for spying on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories for
“coercion purposes” — i.e., gathering info for blackmail - and also for spying on
Palestinian-Americans via an intelligence-sharing agreement with the NSA.“

Unlike many other Unit 8200-linked start-ups at the time, Carbyne also
boasted ties at the time to the Trump administration, including Palantir founder
and Trump ally Peter Thiel — another investor in Carbyne alongside Epstein and
Barak. Thiel’s company Palantir, discussed later in this chapter, is a major
contractor to US intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the US. In addition,
Carbyne’s board of advisers at the time included former Palantir employee Trae
Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, as well as former
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.4 Trump donor and New York
real estate developer Eliot Tawill was also on Carbyne’s board, alongside Ehud
Barak, Nicole Junkermann, and Pinchas Buchris.+ After the personnel shake-up,
its board of advisers now includes former Secretary of Homeland Security under
Trump, Kirstjen Nielsen.1®

Privacy concerns with Carbyne go beyond the company’s ties to Israeli
intelligence and US intelligence contractors like Peter Thiel’s Palantir. For
instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the
phones on which it is installed:

Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a
two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet,
and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice

link drops out. +Z

According to Carbyne’s website, this same information can also be obtained
from any smartphone, even if it does not have Carbyne’s app installed, if that
phone calls a 911 call center that uses Carbyne or merely any other number
connected to Carbyne’s network.

Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of
NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. Thus, even if
Carbyne is not used by all 911 call centers using an NG911 platform, Carbyne will
ostensibly have access to the data used by all emergency service providers and
devices connected to those networks. This guiding principle of NG911 also makes
it likely that one platform will be favored at the federal level to foster such
interconnectivity and, given that it has already been adopted by several counties

and has ties to influential former US government officials, Carbyne is a logical
choice.

Another cause for concern is how other countries have used platforms like
Carbyne, which were first marketed as emergency response tools, for the purpose
of mass surveillance. Narativ noted the following in its investigation of Carbyne:

In May, Human Rights Watch revealed Chinese authorities use a platform not unlike Carbyne to

illegally surveil Uyghurs. China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform brings in a much bigger

data-set and sources of video, which includes an app on people’s phones. Like Carbyne, the

platform was designed to report emergencies. Chinese authorities have turned it into a tool of
18

mass surveillance. =>

Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered the app and discovered that the app
automatically profiles a user under 36 “person types” including “followers of Six
Lines” which is the term used to identify Uyghurs. Another term refers to “Hajj”
the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. The app monitors every aspect of a user’s
life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s
movement./? Such technology is currently used by Israeli military intelligence and
Israel's domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet to justify “pre-crime” detentions of
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Carbyne’s platform has its own “pre-crime” elements, such as its c-Records
component, which stores and analyzes information on past calls and events that
pass through its network. This information “enables decision makers to accurately
analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in
time predict future patterns”? Notably, pre-crime, i.e. “predictive policing,” has
long been a key focus of Palantir, the company co-founded and closely tied to

Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund helped finance Carbyne.*+

PROMIS, PALANTIR, AND PRE-CRIME

iG general terms, Palantir was created to be the privatized panopticon of the

national-security state, the newest rebranding of the big data approach of
intelligence agencies to surveilling both foreign and domestic populations. The
latter in particular has long been a key objective of US intelligence, having been
pioneered by the CIA as far back as the Vietnam War. It was later covertly
turned against the bulk of the US population by both US and Israel intelligence
during the Iran-Contra and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s, though
efforts to use these big data approaches to target domestic protests and specific
social movements had been ongoing for years.

The panopticon was originally an English philosopher’s concept for a new,
revolutionary prison design, but the idea was more fully developed by the French
philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish, noted
that: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of
consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power.” Said differently, the uncertainty that one may be under surveillance at any time
and for any reason induces obedience in that individual, allowing a small number of
people to control the masses.““It is perhaps unsurprising that, for a 2020 profile on
Palantir in the New York Times, the company’s co-founder and CEO Alex Karp
chose to pose with three Palantir employees under a large portrait of Foucault.”

As previously detailed in chapter 9, in the 1980s, individuals at the heart of
the Iran-Contra scandal began to develop a database called Main Core, which
firmly placed the US national security state on its current, tech-fueled Foucauldian
path. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and
service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was
“a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are
considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The
database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost
instantaneously”? It was expressly developed for use in “continuity of
government” (COG) protocols by figures like Oliver North and was used to
compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if
the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked.

Main Core utilized PROMIS software, which was stolen from its owners at
Inslaw Inc. by top Reagan and US intelligence officials as well as Israeli spymaster
Rafi Eitan. Also intimately involved in the PROMIS scandal was media baron
and Israeli “super spy” Robert Maxwell. Like PROMIS, Main Core involved
both US and Israeli intelligence and was a big data approach to the surveillance of
perceived domestic dissidents.”2

Meanwhile, Main Core persisted and continued to amass data. That data
could not be fully tapped into and utilized by the intelligence community until
after the events of September 11, 2001, which offered a golden opportunity for
the use of such tools against the domestic US population, all under the guise of
combating “terrorism.” For example, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
government officials reportedly saw Main Core being accessed by White House
computers.

September 11 was also used as an excuse to remove information “firewalls”
within the national security state, expanding “information sharing” among agency
databases and, by extension, also expanding the amount of data that could be
accessed and analyzed by Main Core and its analogues.

As Alan Wade, then serving as the CIA's chief information officer, pointed out
soon after 9/11:

One of the post-September 11 themes is collaboration and information sharing. We're looking

at tools that facilitate communication in ways that we don’t have today22

In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the
US national security state attempted to institute a “public-private” surveillance
program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due
to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. Called
Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-
seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA.*! The official
agreement was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was
necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally
occurring disease outbreaks before they could take place.

The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief
existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan's National Security
Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that

scandal.** Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that
it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.*2

One of Poindexter’s key allies at the time as it related to TIA was the chief
information officer of the CLA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in
relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the
CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as
“nodes” to TIA in exchange for gaining access to its tools.

The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as
Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public
outrage. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the
surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our
lives would be catalogued,’ while several mainstream media outlets warned that
TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens”3$ Though the program was
defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various
programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence
agencies that make up the US national security state.*° While some of those TIA
programs went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to
wield began to be developed by the very company now known as Palantir, with
considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.

At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was
immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism
Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-
encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically
aimed at “terrorists?” Nevertheless, the TIA program was shuttered by the end of
2003.

The same month as the TIA name change and amid the growing backlash
against the program, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir.*2 Thiel, however, had
begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims
he can’t recall exactly when. Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir co-founders claimed
for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of
Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.*8

Also, in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, none other
than Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the
architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp.
According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter was told by Perle that he

“was precisely the person” who Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because
“their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create
at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA” During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to
pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern
surveillance.’ Perle’s roles at Hollinger International, ties to Israeli espionage
scandals and his lobbying on behalf of Bernard Schwartz's Loral were discussed in
chapters 14 and 17.

Soon after its incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the
investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became Palantir’s
first backer, aside from Thiel himself, who invested an estimated $2 million in the
company.“ In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-
2006.44

Though the influx of cash was certainly useful, Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp later
told the New York Times that “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it
gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients?” A key
figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including
Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade.

After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA would be Palantir’s only client until
2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers — Aki Jain and Stephen
Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia every two weeks.**
Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005
and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s
software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to
California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s
chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade, played a key role in many of these
meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products.

It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a clear overlap between
Palantir’s products and the vision that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed
TIA program. One can see the obvious parallels between Palantir and TIA by
examining how the masterminds behind each describe their key functions.

Take, for instance, the following excerpt from Shane Harris’ book The
Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State regarding Wade's and Poindexter’s
views of TIA’ “built-in privacy protections”:

Wade liked the idea, but he heard something even more intriguing in Poindexter’s pitch, a
concept that he hadn't heard in any of the tech briefings he'd sat through since 9/11: the words

“protect privacy.’ Wade thought that Poindexter’s was the first ambitious information
architecture that included privacy from the ground up.

He described his privacy appliance concept, in which a physical device would set between
the use and the data, shielding the names and other identifying information of the millions of
innocent people in the noise. The TIA system would employ “selective revelation,” Poindexter
explained. The farther into the data a user wished to probe, the more outside authority he had to

obtain 42

Compare TIA's “selective revelation” sales pitch with that more recently
offered by Karp and Thiel to the New York Times about Palantir’s own supposed
privacy safeguards:

Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to
make software that could help keep the country safe from terrorism. The second was to prove
that there was a technological solution to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil
liberties — a “Hegelian” aspiration, as Karp puts it. Although political opposites, they both feared
that personal privacy would be a casualty of the war on terrorism...

To that end, Palantir’s software was created with two primary security features: Users are
able to access only information they are authorized to view, and the software generates an audit
trail that, among other things, indicates if someone has tried to obtain material off-limits to

them 2

The explanation offered by Poindexter and Wade for TIA and the explanation
presented by Karp and Thiel for Palantir are essentially analogous. Similarly,
Palantir’s “immutable log” concept, whereby “everything a user does in Palantir
creates a trail that can be audited,’ was also a hallmark of the TIA system
envisioned by Poindexter and Wade.*4

As noted in The Watchers:

Poindexter also proposed “an immutable audit trail,’ a master record of every analyst who had
used the TIA system, what data they'd touched, what they’d done with it. The system would be
trained to spot suspicious patterns of use.... Poindexter wanted to use TIA to watch the

watchers. The CIA team [including Alan Wade] liked what they heard.48

The benefits in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a completely private
entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are obvious. For instance, given that
Palantir is a private company as opposed to a government program, the way its
software is used by its government and corporate clients benefits from “plausible
deniability” and frees Palantir from constraints that would be present if it were
instead a project tied to the military or public sector.

As noted in an October 2020 profile on the company in the New York Times:

The data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients’ premises, is controlled by the
customer, and Palantir says it does not police the use of its products. Nor are the privacy
controls foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who gets to see what and how vigilant

they wish to be.42

CHRISTINE MAXWELL’S CHILIAD

hile Wade was involved in operating the information technology

infrastructure of US intelligence and in guiding the rise of Palantir, he was
also intimately involved with another company known as Chiliad. Chiliad was a
data analytics company founded in the late 1990s by Paul McOwen, Robert
Maxwells daughter Christine Maxwell, and an unnamed third individual.
However, sources such as Bloomberg lists Alan Wade as the “mysterious” third co-
founder of Chiliad, meaning that Wade, as the third co-founder, was involved in
creating Chiliad while also serving in a top post at the CIA.*4 The company was
founded with “$3 million in angel investment” of unknown origin.°2

This is significant for two main reasons. First, Chiliad was developed to be the
very tool that would be sought by US intelligence in the immediate aftermath of
September 11, an event that notably took place shortly after Wade became the
CIA’s chief information officer. The company had conveniently been set up well
in advance, allowing it to score key contracts with the US government, including
the FBI, thanks to the advanced stage of its product as well as its founders’s
intelligence connections. This, along with a glowing recommendation from the
9/11 Commission, benefited Chiliad’s software, which was remarkably similar to
the PROMIS software and early versions of Palantir.24

Due to ongoing litigation in the PROMIS case, efforts were made by the US
national security state to retool and tweak the PROMIS software sufficiently so
that they could argue that the software then in use had become dissimilar to the
original stolen product, according to the original PROMIS developer, Bill
Hamilton of Inslaw Inc. To avoid further litigation with Inslaw, the authors of the
theft of PROMIS, and other beneficiaries of that theft, likely saw a need to create
analogous software, likely by further developing already modified versions of
PROMIS, that appeared to have different origins.

Second, Wade, who was employed by the CIA at the time of Chiliad’s
founding, created the company with Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine
Maxwell and daughter of Robert Maxwell. As noted in chapter 9, Christine was
intimately involved in and ended up leading the US-based front company that
Robert Maxwell had used to sell versions of PROMIS that seriously compromised
US national security. Her subsequent effort, through the McKinley Group, was

an effort that involved several of her siblings (Isabel, Kevin and Ghislaine) and
was aimed at “rebuilding” their father’s legacy. As was also noted in chapter 9, US
intelligence, Israeli intelligence and figures tied to organized crime were all
intimately involved in the PROMIS software scandal. Thus, the involvement of
both Wade and Maxwell in creating Chiliad and the overlap between the
PROMIS software and Chiliad’s software, suggests Chiliad was a successor to
PROMIS produced by this same network.

In addition, Wade's role in the rise of Palantir suggests that Palantir may be
another successor to PROMIS, a possibility explored in greater detail in my past
reporting at MintPress News.*° Maxwell’s involvement with the company suggests
that Chiliad could also have carried a back door, much like the original PROMIS,
to give foreign intelligence agencies or other groups covert access to the electronic
infrastructure of the FBI and US intelligence community.

Other notable and relevant aspects, in terms of the Maxwell connection to
Chiliad include a key source of its early funding. According to reports, among
Chiliad’s three early investors was Allied Commercial Exporters Ltd., which is
based in London. Company records show that the company is part of the business
empire of British real estate mogul, Jack Dellal.“ As previously noted in chapter 4,
Dellal was a member of the Clermont Club, whose early members included either
individuals tied to the Profumo Affair or subsequent business associates of Robert
Maxwell, such as James Goldsmith and Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland.

Dellal was a noted gambler and a rather infamous banker who is alleged to
have played a role in the collapse of Keyser Ullman due to fraudulent loans, many
of which were tied to real estate markets and some of which were used to finance
the foundations of Dellal’s subsequent real estate empire.*® Keyser Ullman, prior
to its collapse, was also intimately linked to the main business concern of Tiny
Rowland, Lonrho (see chapter 6).

Another key source of funding for Chiliad was Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-
Packard has long had a very close relationship with US intelligence, which
expanded dramatically in 2001 under the leadership of its then-CEO Carly
Fiorina.>2

Notably, Palantir began its rise to prominence as the go-to counterterrorism
software of the West, just as Chiliad began to pivot away from that sector. Chiliad
eventually folded a few years later. Notably, in the years prior to its shutdown,
Chiliad had begun moving into health-care data, a pivot that became very obvious

by 2012, when it began adding prominent health-care industry executives to its
company board and getting involved in aiding “medical research”

Not long after Chiliad was shut down, Wade, who had also been the chairman
of its board for many years, was added to the board of a UK cybersecurity firm
called Darktrace.® Darktrace is the result of the joining of UK intelligence with a
team of AI researchers at Cambridge who were seeking to develop the AI
“singularity” This attempt at “self-aware” AI was subsequently developed into
“cybersecurity” software under the watchful eye and direction of UK intelligence.
Darktrace’s intelligence-linked software now runs not only a large swath of the UK
power grid and the computers of major corporations around the world but also
cybersecurity for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), giving it access to
masses of patient-health data.

Not long after Darktrace’s foray into healthcare began, Palantir made its own
pivot into healthcare, both for the NHS in the UK and the Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) in the US. The latter partnership has expanded
considerably during the Covid-19 crisis, from the HHS Protect database to
contact tracing to Operation Warp Speed. Palantir’s expansion into nearly every
sector of government is set to continue, particularly with president Biden's
appointed leader of the US intelligence community—Avril Haines, who was a
consultant to Palantir right up until she joined Biden's 2020 campaign as an
adviser.

Notably, Palantir’s expansion into the NHS was facilitated in part by the NHS
Healthtech Advisory Board, which was created in 2018 to advise the UK's then-
Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock. On that board was a familiar
face, Nicole Junkermann. One of the other board members, and its alleged
architect, is a military and intelligence-linked figure named Daniel Korski. The
same year the Healthtech Advisory Board was created, Korski co-founded the
Govtech Summit, which has heavily promoted the products of Carbyne911 and
related companies.

That these very networks would converge around valuable stores of personal
health data is no accident, as the intelligence-linked Epstein was also seeking to
move into this space. Around the same time he sought to rebrand as a tech
investor, Epstein was also working to build up a company focused around “DNA
data-mining.” Created in 2012, Southern Trust was a “start-up” created by Epstein
with the apparent goal of sequencing people's genomes and selling that data to the

pharmaceutical industry.®° Per reports, Southern Trust sought to create a “search
engine capable of pinpointing genetic links to diseases.”©&

Epstein claimed that “what Southern Trust will do will be basically organizing
mathematical algorithms so that if I want to know what my predisposition is for
cancer we can now have my genes specifically sequenced.”© Epstein was
reportedly working with at least one US scientist on the project who was afhliated
with Harvard, though their identity remains unknown. As previously
mentioned, Epstein had funded the work of several prominent scientists and
Epstein likely had recruited one of them to the project. Of the scientists Epstein
funded, Harvard’s Martin Nowak fits the description of the scientist that Epstein
gave in testimony. Epstein had previously donated $6.5 million in 2003 to
Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Nowak led.© In 2012, the
year Southern Trust was created, Nowak had developed mathematical models that
described the behavior of colon cancer cells.

Southern Trust specifically sought to gather DNA from residents of the US
Virgin Islands, where Southern Trust was based. This DNA collection would then
be used to “create a catalog of population-level genetics data.” Then, Southern
Trust’s team would develop a search engine to assess that data for links to diseases
that Epstein once called a “biomedical Google” The company then planned to
create a “virtual laboratory” to conduct experiments via computer models as well
as to produce “computer generated solutions for medical problems.”

The company also, oddly, planned to amass data for its proprietary search
engine that would allow it “to search things on an individual basis both in the
medical field and the financial field.” Southern Trust was also described as
planning to provide “cutting edge consulting services to companies around the
world lying in part upon the use of biomedical and financial information.” Was
Southern Trust seeking to correlate people's genetic data with their financial data?

Epstein also said of his vision for the company that “I would like to have
young people — I’m a teacher by heart — engaged early on” in his project. Epstein
also spoke at length in testimony saying that he wanted to train young people to
program and develop his company’s algorithms, training them in the Virgin
Islands. He also implied that he would one day would be able to tailor educational
programs for those young people based on their sequenced genome.

Despite being a sex offender and having suffered a financial decline due to his
past controversies the 2008 financial crash, Epstein’s Southern Trust netted him

$200 million in a few short years and was a key part of what the New York Times

described as Epstein’s “financial rebound.”

THE FUTURE OF BLACKMAIL

1G 2012, Epstein seemed to know something that those guiding other, more

prominent “data mining” firms like Chiliad and Palantir also knew - that, soon,
data would become the world’s most valuable commodity. This would become a
common public talking point in the years that followed. For instance, in 2017, The
Economist declared that the world’s most valuable resource was no longer oil, but
data. Referring to data as “the oil of the digital era,’ it notes that this new “data
economy” runs on masses of data generated by billions of devices as well as
algorithms, particularly Artificial Intelligence algorithms. It also notes that the
“data economy” is intimately linked to Big Tech's “surveillance systems,’ which
gives these powerful companies a “God's eye view” of both markets and citizen
behavior.

Epstein’s decision to court and gather “dirt” on Big Tech scions, while also
rebranding as a tech investor and entrepreneur, was carefully calculated. Indeed,
he and the Maxwells were intimately aware of how the digital revolution was
drastically reshaping the face of blackmail and influence operations. Arguably
beginning with the PROMIS software scandal, which intimately involved the
Maxwells, the utility of bugged software to intelligence agencies quickly became
obvious. With a few lines of surreptitious code, intelligence agencies could gain
access to troves of sensitive data in real-time, which previously would have
required scores of highly embedded and sophisticated spies. Yet, those spies could
be caught if just one in their network slipped up. However, with a few lines hidden
among thousands and thousands lines of code, a software program's “treachery” is
much more difficult to detect.

By the time computers and mobile phones began to become increasingly
commonplace, the more communication that took place in the digital world.
People, including powerful businessmen and politicians, began conducting much
of their most sensitive communications, both personally and professionally, on
electronic devices. Leaks from Hillary Clinton’s email server and, more recently,
Hunter Biden's laptop, are important reminders of this. The more dependent
people became on digital platforms and software, the more that their data could
reveal about their preferences (whether “normal”, embarrassing or abnormal) and
their activities (whether legal or criminal).

While Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, throughout the 1990s and
beyond, blackmailed powerful people using trafficked women and girls, the digital
revolution offered them, and their benefactors, a new opportunity to fulfill the
same operational goals, but with much less risk. For example, if a Congressman’s
phone or computer logs attempts to access pornography websites, one needs only
obtain the electronic proof of those searches or website visits to blackmail that
Congressman. There is no longer a need to spend significant sums of money on
maintaining remote locations with pinhole cameras or on maintaining a harem of
trafficked women and girls. Instead one only needs to gain access to the data on
the person they are targeting in order to find their darkest and most damaging
secrets.

Some of Epstein’s own interest in technology appears to have been informed
by his obsessions with genetics and eugenics, as well as his interest in the merging
of man and technology (i.e. transhumanism).2 However, it appears that his
targeting of top leaders of Big Tech, via Edge and other means beginning in the
late 1990s and early 2000s, was based on a belief that, if he could exert influence
over those who controlled Big Tech (influence which he claimed to have due to
his knowledge of their sexual proclivities), he could gain privileged access to the
masses of data they harvest and control. Given the intersections of Epstein and the
Maxwell to the tech sector over the years, and how their involvement with Big
Tech grew precipitously after Epstein’s sex trafficking operation first came under
scrutiny and fell apart, it appears that Epstein and Maxwell moved away from
sexual forms of blackmail to electronic forms of blackmail, from sex trafficking to
data trafficking.

While this shift may have provided new opportunities for Epstein and
Maxwell, it also made them irrelevant. If software can be exploited to extract and
compile secrets and artificial intelligence can then analyze that information, then
human operators of previous varieties of blackmail schemes become increasingly
unnecessary. In a world where blackmail is overwhelmingly electronic, people like
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell become liabilities to be silenced, rather
than assets to protect.

Another critical consequence of the advent of electronic blackmail is that the
very same systems that enable that blackmail to occur are intimately enmeshed
with the infrastructure of mass surveillance. This is the core idea behind the
panopticon model. As noted earlier in this chapter, if an individual is under the

impression that they may be being watched at any given time for any given reason,
the perpetual possibility of surveillance induces obedience. Such a model allows
for the masses to be controlled much more easily. The ultimate goal of blackmail is
also control, albeit of a different variety. Yet, with mass surveillance and the ability
to harvest the digitally logged secrets of anyone with a digital profile, this allows
forms of control, like blackmail, to be used on a mass scale.

No longer must intelligence assets develop and execute sophisticated
operations to obtain damaging information on a person — that information now
likely lies in their digital footprint. This is not just true for men and women of
power and influence — today it is true for most of us in our increasingly digital
world. In order to obtain damaging information on a person of interest,
intelligence agencies and their allies in the corporate world or the world of
organized crime, only need to search for that person in the right database. In a
matter of seconds, your secrets are in their hands.

While the United States has long been “one nation under blackmail,” the
perpetuation of this system and means of control is rapidly reaching its logical
conclusion. Before, public officials, politicians and others of power and influence
were targeted with blackmail. Now, blackmail is more readily accessible and more
easily obtained on any American than ever before in history. We now live in a
reality where our communications are monitored and stored, where many
willingly surround themselves with audio and video recording devices that
intelligence agencies have known access to.”

The more we live our lives on our phones and our computers, the more we
can be exploited if and when certain groups and networks with access to our data
decide that they want something from us. Yet, now that these corrupt power
structures have grown so accustomed to our digital dependence, we now have the
chance to disrupt the empire that they have built on a foundation of blackmail,
bribes and bullets. By taking ownership of our data, and depriving intelligence-
linked Big Tech their monopoly of control over it, we can start to rupture a system
that would enslave us if allowed to advance. Main Core, Total Information
Awareness and other such systems have never gone away and lie in wait, waiting to
be weaponized against the civilian populace if and when demands for change
become too great.

The power structures explored in this book represent generational networks
of criminal activity. Those networks have only continued to grow and accumulate

power through their corruption of institutions, including the government and the
media. Also key to their success has been our compliance. However, our
compliance is born out of the belief that our institutions are not corrupt or, at
least, not that corrupt.

When one realizes where power really lies and how it really functions, it
becomes clear that the only way to deter a corrupt system of this magnitude,
which has now merged public and private power into the hands of a very small
few, is not to comply. The government is no longer capable of investigating itself
and our institutions have long been too compromised to guarantee American
well-being or the American way of life. Instead quite the opposite has taken place.
The US, after being used by these networks to loot countries around the world,
has itself been looted and hung out to dry to benefit families and groups who trace
their origins back to when organized crime first merged with intelligence.

Upon realizing the reality of the situation, as this book has endeavored to
show, non-compliance is a must when facing a system that, among other crimes, is
willing to enable and engage in the unconscionable exploitation and abuse of
children to further its stranglehold over the country, and ultimately over us.

Endnotes

16
17

Emilie Ikeda, “Aging’ 911 Systems Slowly Begin to See Video and Text Upgrades,’ Fox News,

video-and-text-upgrades-nationwide; Eytan Halon, “Jerusalem Looks to Hi-Tech to Protect
Social Workers, Teachers,’ February 5, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/Jpost-Tech/Jerusalem-
looks-to-hi-tech-to-protect-social-workers-teachers-579737.

“Carbyne Partners With Global Hitss, an América Móvil Company, to Bring Next-Gen
Emergency Response Technology to Latin America,’ PR Newswire, October 24, 2018,

américa-mo6vil-company-to-bring-next-gen-emergency-response-technology-to-latin-
america-851182270.html.

carbyne911.comi3-compliant-scaled.jpg.

Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy, “Jeffrey Epstein: Building Big Brother,’ Narativ, July 27, 2019,
https://narativ.org/2019/07/27/building-big-brother/.

“Our Team - Carbyne,’ Carbyne,

buchris/.

“Our Team - Carbyne’’

John Reed, “Unit 8200: Israel's Cyber Spy Agency,’ Financial Times, July 10, 2015,
https://www.ft.com/content/69f150da-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c.

“NSA, Israel Created Stuxnet Worm Together to Attack Iran, Says Snowden,’ South China
Morning Post, July 9, 2013, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1278286/nsa-israel-
created-stuxnet-worm-together-attack-iran-says-snowden.

James Bamford, “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA,” Wired,
April 3, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/.

Whitney Webb, “The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton Relationship,’

bill-clinton-relationship/261455/.
Staff, “Snowden Reveal Makes Israeli Spies’ Protest An American Issue,” NPR, September 21,

makes-israeli-spies-protest-an-american-issue.

Shalev and McElroy, “Building Big Brother.”

“Our Team - Carbyne’’

Rich Bockmann, “NYC Real Estate Players Are Wasting No Time Backing Trump's 2020 Run,’

The Real Deal New York, April 17, 2017, https://therealdeal.com/2017/04/17/nyc-real-estate-
players-are-wasting-no-time-backing-trumps-2020-run/.

“Management Team,’ Carbyne, https://carbyne.com/en/management-team/.

Andrew Westrope, “Carbyne-Cisco Partnership Means loT Data for 911 Dispatch,’ Gov-Tech,

18
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20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27
28

29
30

31

32

33
34

35

for-911-Dispatch.html.

Shalev and McElroy, “Building Big Brother.”

Shalev and McElroy, “Building Big Brother.”

“C-Records,’ Carbyne,

Ali Winston, “Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing
Technology,’ The Verge, February 27, 2018,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-
orleans-nopd.

For more on this topic, see: Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 1st ed (New York:
Morrow, 1990); Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).

Johnny Vedmore, “Daniel Korski: The Intelligence-Linked Mastermind Behind the UK's
Orwellian Healthtech Advisory Board,’ Unlimited Hangout, October 1, 2020,
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/10/investigative-reports/korski/.

Michael Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?,” New York Times, October 21, 2020,

Whitney Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings,’
MintPress News, September 6, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-
jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/.

Christopher Ketcham, “THE LAST ROUNDUP: Is the Government Compiling e List of Citizens
to Detain under Martial Law?,’ Radar Online, May/June 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20090129230746/http://radaronline.com:80/from-the-
magazine/2008/05/government_surveillance homeland security main core 01-
print.php.

Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings.”

Whitney Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business - Investigative Series,’ Unlimited Hangout,
2020, https://unlimitedhangout.com/the-maxwell-family-business/.

Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings.’

Justin Hibbard, “[ISN] Mission Possible,” InfoSec News, January 18, 2002,
http://lists.jammed.com/ISN/2002/01/0069.html.

“Q&A on the Pentagon's ‘Total Information Awareness’ Program,’ American Civil Liberties
Union, https://www.aclu.org/other/qa-pentagons-total-information-awareness-program.
“Q&A on the Pentagon's ‘Total Information Awareness’ Program,’; David Johnston,
“Poindexter Is Found Guilty of All 5 Criminal Charges for Iran-Contra Cover-Up,’ New York
of-all-5-criminal-charges-for-iran-contra-cover-up.html.

“Q&A on the Pentagon's ‘Total Information Awareness’ Program.”

Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (New York: Penguin Press,
2010), 189, https://archive.org/details/watchersriseofamOOharr/.

“Q&A on the Pentagon's ‘Total Information Awareness’ Program,’; Rob Morse, “Fighting
Terror by Terrifying U.S. Citizens,” SFGATE, November 20, 2002,

2752084.php.

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38

39

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41
42
43

44
45
46
47
48
49
50

51

52
53

54
55

Mark Williams Pontin, “The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On,” MIT Technology
Review, April 26, 2006, https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/04/26/229286/the-total-
information-awareness-project-lives-on/.

“A (Pretty) Complete History of Palantir,” Maus Strategic Consulting, May 16, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140516035733/http:/www.mausstrategicconsulting.com/1/

Andy Greenberg, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining
Juggernaut,’ Forbes, August 14, 2013,

Sharon Weinberger, “Is Palantir’s Crystal Ball Just Smoke and Mirrors?,” Intelligencer,
September 28, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/inside-palantir-
technologies-peter-thiel-alex-karp.html.

Vaibhavi Khanwalkar, “Before Secretive Palantir Went Public, AOC Warned SEC Of ‘Material
Risks’ To Investors,’ International Business Times, October 1, 2020,
https://www.ibtimes.com/secretive-palantir-went-public-aoc-warned-sec-material-risks-
investors-3055015.

“A (Pretty) Complete History of Palantir.:

Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”

The Agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) works closely with In-Q-tel to identify
investments that are of interest to the Agency. The CIO of the CIA at the time In-Q-tel
invested in Palantir was Alan Wade. For the role the CIA's CIO plays in In-Q-tel, See: Rick E.
Yannuzzi, In-Q-Tel: A New Partnership Between the CIA and the Private Sector, (Joint Militrary
Intelligence College Foundation, 2000),
https://web.archive.org/web/20190404132537/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/int
elligence-history/in-g-tel.

Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”

Harris, The Watchers, 189.

Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”

Greenberg, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir.”

Harris, The Watchers, 190.

Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”

Christopher Calnan, “Chiliad Nets $4.5M of New $6M Round,’ Boston Business Journal, May 8,
2007, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2007/03/chiliad-nets-
45m-of-new-6m-round.html.

“Chiliad Inc Company Profile,’ Bloomberg,

Calnan, “Chiliad Nets $4.5M of New $6M Round.”

“Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem, Hires Dan
Ferranti as CEO,” Business Wire, August 29, 2019,

problem-hires-dan-ferranti-ceo-industry.
“Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem.”
Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business - Investigative Series.’

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61

62

63

64
65

66

67

68

69

70

71
72

Webb, “The CIA, Mossad and “Epstein Network” Are Exploiting Mass Shootings.”
information.service.gov.uk/company/00403053/officers.

David Brewerton, “Jack Dellal Obituary,’ The Guardian, November 8, 2012,
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/08/jack-dellal.

Jim Geraghty, “The CEO and the CIA,’ National Review, May 5, 2015,

“Chiliad Removes the Big Data Consolidation Obstacle for Government and Healthcare With
Discovery/Alert 7.0,’ Business Wire, October 2, 2012,
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20121002005564/en/Chiliad-Removes-the-Big-
Data-Consolidation-Obstacle-for-Government-and-Healthcare-With-DiscoveryAlert-7.0;
“Chiliad Inc. Names Thomas R. Sobocinski National Healthcare Executive; Brings More Than
30 Years Experience in Healthcare Provider and Insurance Industries,” Insurance NewsNet,
June 28, 2012, https://insurancenewsnet.com/oarticle/Chiliad-Inc-Names-Thomas-R-
Sobocinski-National-Healthcare-Executive-Brings-Mo-a-347855; “Chiliad Appoints Dr.
Douglas M. Boyle to Board of Directors, Experienced Healthcare Executive to Help Guide
Chiliad’s Expansion into Healthcare Market,’ PRWeb, November 20, 2012,
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/11/prweb10153900.htm; “Chiliad Inc Company

board/.

Johnny Vedmore, “Darktrace and Cybereason: The Intelligence Front Companies Seeking to
Subjugate the World with the A.I. Singularity,’ Unlimited Hangout, November 3, 2020,

Murtaza Hussain, “Controversial Data-Mining Firm Palantir Vanishes From Biden Adviser's
Biography After She Joins Campaign,’ The Intercept, June 26, 2020,
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/26/biden-adviser-avril-haines-palantir/.

Vedmore, “Daniel Korski.’

Erin Brodwin, “Jeffrey Epstein Had a ’Frankenstein’-like Plan to Analyze Human DNA in the
US Virgin Islands, and It Reportedly Pulled in $200 Million,’ Business Insider, October 4, 2019,
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-dna-genetics-research-drug-companies-
2019-8.

Brodwin, “Jeffrey Epstein Had a ’Frankenstein’-like Plan.”
Brodwin, “Jeffrey Epstein Had a ’Frankenstein’-like Plan.”
“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission, 2012,

Economic.html#text/p38.
Nicholas M. Ciarelli, “Harvard To Keep Epstein Gift,’ The Harvard Crimson, September 13,

“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission.
“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission.

73
74
75
76

77

78

T9

“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission.

“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission.

“Jeffrey Epstein Testimony,’ Economic Development Commission.

Matthew Goldstein and Steve Eder, “Jeffrey Epstein Raked In $200 Million After Legal and
Financial Crises,” New York Times, October 3, 2019,

“The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, but Data,’ The Economist, May 6, 2017,
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-
longer-oil-but-data,

Epstein’s interest in transhumanism was, unfortunately, under-explored in this book. For
example, Epstein funded the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+) and its
chairman, Al researcher Ben Goertzel. See: Michael Cook, “The Bizarre Transhumanist
Fantasies of Jeffrey Epstein,’ BioEdge, August 3, 2019,
https://bioedge.org/uncategorized/the-bizarre-transhumanist-fantasies-of-jeffrey-epstein/;
Edward Helmore, “Epstein Reportedly Hoped to Develop Super-Race of Humans with His
DNA,’ The Guardian, August 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-

Chris Smith, “How a Smartphone Backdoor Can Be Used to Spy on Absolutely Everything
You Do,’ Yahoo, December 19, 2016, https://www.yahoo.com/tech/smartphone-back-door-

PHOTOGRAPHS & DOCUMENTS

1967 0506A High School Boys Cabin Ioc:

Jeffrey Epstein (1st on the left, top row) at the Interlochen Center for the Arts
Summer School in 1967.

ALF S
BACHELOR

OF THE MONTH

[> Financial strate-
gist Jeffrey Epstein,
27, talks only to peo-
ple who make over a
million a year! If
you're “a cute Texas
girl,” write this New
York dynamo at 55
Water St., 49th floor,
N.Y.C. 10041.

PHOTO BY STEPHEN OGILVY

Jeffrey Epstein was featured as “bachelor of the month” in the July 1980 issue
of Cosmopolitan. He was then working for Bear Stearns.
Source: Cosmopolitan, July 1980, Photo by Stephen Ogilvy.

Ghislaine Maxwell and Joe Kennedy at a reception following Kerry Kennedy's
wedding to Andrew Cuomo in 1990. The caption for the photo from Star
Magazine suggested that their interactions at the wedding were flirtatious.

A OA B TAR
1 “Gian

Esther Dyson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Russian Federal Nuclear Center employee
Pavel Oleynikov pose in front of Andrei Sakharov's house in Sarov, Russia in
April 1998.

Nathan Myhrvold and Jeffrey Epstein chat at the 2000 Edge Billionaires’
Dinner.

Source: https://www.edge.org/igd/1200.

Microsoft's Paul Allen poses for a photo with Nicole Junkermann at the
Cinema Against AIDS Cannes event in Cannes, France. Getty Images.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell greet then-President Bill Clinton at a
September 1993 Donor Reception at the White House. Source: William J.
Clinton Presidential Library.

Bill Clinton meets with Chinese weapons dealer Wang Jun in February 1996.
Source: White House Communications Agency.

The Clintons photographed with Ng Lap Seng at a DNC event, date
unknown. Source: DNC.

Charlie Trie testifies before the House Government Reform and Oversight
Committee on March 1, 2000. Source: C-SPAN.

April 27, 1995

President William T. Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

It was a pleasure to see you recently at Senator Kennedy's
house. There was too much to discuss and too little time. Using my
fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency
Stabilization, I neglected to-talk with you about a topic near and dear
to my heart. Namely, affirmative action and the future. I am
sending you a copy of a memo George Stephanopoulos asked me to
prepare, and an article about my participation in an FCC set aside
program.

I would very much like to continue my involvement with this

issue. You deserve a lot of credit for many of your initiatives in this
area. Let me know if I can help you in any way.

Sincerely,

A
k Lynn Forester

A 1995 letter from Lynn Forester to President Clinton that discusses Jeffrey Epstein.

â offshorealert.com

ALL NEWS RESEARCH CONFEREN OPINION

FORUM Henne Theres t Cit otsaga Haed J Priya Laesi

Anonymes Posted: Swerdey Avge! 13, 201

Po 010 12:31:20 PM

osted: 2/2/2010
By: Wrong email

Just for reference, my emai is

humeral

maagainstfraud.com

flack ^o oe

Anonymous Posted Sonraoy Aupas! 13. 20
rosted: 2/2/2010 6:29:20 AM
Sy: Hunter - mentined in Tedder mat
Back in my days of posting information on David Tedder, the
name Douglas Leese showed uo quite a bit David Marchant
wrote some stories on Tedder but | didnt search the KYC

ry library before making thks post to check on Leese

Check the KYC story library, search this board, and google
name - maybe some of my old posts will show up

Uach % top

intarnel Adwinietrasor Pasted: Saunday Auge! 11. 20

donat: 1012720: Posted: 1/31/2010 7-0058 PM

Poux 5779

life

where
have such unusual memories of him in the 70's when he

had a house in Belgrave Maws 14, when he had bought
ord Long's Wraxhall Estates... and gave very unusual

artes

Back tac

The administrator of Offshore Alerts discusses his experiences with Douglas Leese, a
mentor of Epstein’s.

The invitation list for the September 1993 Donors Reception at the White
House that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attended. Also listed as
attending are Clark Clifford and C. Gerald Goldsmith.

DSi/, peast.com/jetirey-epstein-visited-clinton-white-nouse

A letter to Jeffrey Epstein from Executive Vice President of the White House
Historical Association, Bernard Meyer, thanking Epstein for his donation of
$10,000. The address listed for Epstein is his office at the Villard House he
shared with ee Gouletas-Carey.

MEMO TO: Curtis K. Marcum #2029, Commander, Organized Crihe Bu:
FROM: Elizabeth A. Leupp, Analyst, Organized Crime Bureau

DATE: June 6, 1991

SUBJECT: SHAPIRO HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION

Sir:

An analytical project was opened in 1985 as a result of the
mob-style murder of Arthur Shapiro, a local attorney in the
law firm (then) of Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm and Warren.

Because of the strong similarities between this homicide and
a Mafia (L.C.N.) “hit", the analysis included an in-depth
study of major L.C.N. groups having contact in/near the
central Ohio area. These groups seem to include crime
"families" in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, and to
some degree, the Genovese family in New York City.

There seems to be very little reliable investigative
literature concerning the Chicago and Detroit groups.
However, we do have access to reports from MAGLOCLEN, the
Pennsylvania Crime Commission and the New Jersey Commission of
Investigation with reference to groups in Ohio and areas to
the east of us. The attached L.C.N. information was lifted
(and in many cases, blatantly plagiarized) from those sources.

Over time, the analysis of the Shapiro homicide became greatly
expanded and more complex with the development of unusual
interactive relationships between the following business
organizations:

(a) The Major Chord Jazz Club and its parent/investment
groups (now defunct),

(b) The Limited and its investment interests,

(c) The Walsh Trucking Company and the alleged relationship
between owner Frank Walsh and the Genovese crime family,

(å) The law firm now known as Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and
Rubenstein (homicide detectives report that the name was
chenged within hours of Shapiro's homicide),

{e) Omni Oil Company (dba Omni Petroleum, Orni Exploration),

(f) The Edward DeBartole Corperation, of Youngstown, Ohio
and the alleged relationship between owner
DeBartolo and the Genovese crime family;

(g) John W. Kessler, local developer.

The attached link diagram illustrates these apparer
relationships.

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecomplete1.

The primary source(s) of our information are intelligence summaries
from investigators in our bureau, intelligence from MAGLOCLEN, the
Pennsylvania Crime Commission, and the New Jersey Commission of
Investigation, and published reports from major media (newspapers,
periodicals). Copies of relevant reports are available for
reference.

Ti Historical Data (dees not necessarily reflect current
conditions):

A. The Major chord Jazz club and Jesry II Limited
Partnership (now defunct).

1. Jesry Il Limited Partnership was formed to own and
manage the jazz club. This partnership is operated
by Jesry Il Corporation, of which Jerry Hammond was
president. Mr. Hammond was also president of
Columbus City Council at the tine.

2. SR SE is named as an investor in the
azz club. It was incorporated August 6, 1987 by
James H. Balthaser, attorney with Schwartz, Keln,
Warren and Rubenstein. This law firm is/was legal

counsel for The Limited.

The address for NJC Holding is Suite 3710,
Huntington Center, the same address as Wexner
Investment Company

.

3. Wá K Partnership was not registered and its owners
could not be positively identified, but it is
listed as an investor in the jazz club.

It is noted, however, that Wexner and Kessler are
co-developers of "Wexley", and there was an
annextion dispute involving the city of Columbus
and "Wexley” land. It is possible that W 4&4 K

was the forerunner of the New Albany.
Company through which Wexner and Kessler developed
“Wexley".

The Smith-Haie Partnership was the investment of
Ben W. Hale, Jr., and Constance Smith in the jazz
Club. Mr. Hale and Mrs. Smith's husband, Harrison
W. Smith, are partners in the law firm of Smith and
Hale, who represented "“Wexley" developers Wexner
and Kessler in the land annexation dispute.

P ie coPY

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive,org/details/shapiromurderfilecomplete.

Other Related Entities:

1. The law firm now known as Schwartz, Kelm, Warren é

represented The Limited. Prior to his

death, Arthur Shapiro seanaced this account for the

law firm: Stanley Schwartz, senior partner, took
over the account when Shapiro died.

2. Wexner Investment Company was incorporated December
31, 1987 by Stanley Schwartz as agent.

Samax Trading Corporation, a company Wexner
controls, was incorporated in July 1985 by Stanley
Schwartz who described the purpose: “the privately
held company is engaged in business liquidation."

4. Through Samax, Wexner acquired 70 percent of Omni

(dba Omni Oil) in August 1985. Stanley

Schwartz was elected to the board of directors with
Wexner.

5. Walsh Trucking Company is/was the major trucking
company for The Limited. Francis "Frank" Walsh,
owner and president, allegedly has strong ties to
the Genovese crime fanily.

In July 1984, National Westminister Bank of New
York notified W

i{Company) that the New York Department of Law
Organized Crime Task Force had issued a subpoena
for Walsh's bank records. The notice was addressed
to Frenk Walsh Financial Resources at One Limited
Parkway--the address of The Limited.

6. Leslie Wexner and the Youngstown, Ohio developer,
Edward J. DeBartolo, have a long history of
partnership in business dealings. Mr. DeBartolo
allegedly has strong ties to the Genovese/LaRocca.
crime family.

Other Data Supporting Linkage:

> Harold L. Levin, president of Wexner Investment
Company, is also vice-president of P.F.I. Leasing
Company. The two companies share a common
telephone number on the 37th floor of the
Huntington Center office building.

2. The 37th floor of the Huntington Center is also the
address for the Johp W. Kessler Company and the New

Albany Company. co pY

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

3. The Wexner Investment Company also has an office in
Suite 1675 of the Huntington Center, as does First
Intercontinental Realty and Omni Exploration. The
16th floor is also one of two offices for the law
firm of Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein.

4. In April 1986, Richard W. Rubenstein (Schwartz,
Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein) was cited for speed ina
vehicle registered to F.F.I. Leasing Company.

5. In Bexley, Leslie Wexner and Stanley Schwartz
are/were next door neighbors. Harold Levin lives
across the street from them.

Dk Robert Morosky

t. Arthur Shapiro was reportedly in direct contact
with Vice-Chairman Robert Morosky ("Number Two") at
The Limited.

2. It has been noted that Les Wexner and Edward
DeBartolo have a long history of business
partnerships.

3. In June 1987, Robert Morosky abruptly and
inexplicably left his employment with The Limited
amid rumors of friction with Les Wexner.

’.

4. Morosky then appeared in the hierarchy of Campeau's
Allied Stores amid rumors that Wexner had planned
to acquire the stores.

5. DeBartolo had loaned financial backing to Campeau's
investment in Allied ard Federated.

II BASES FOR CONCLUSION

A.

Arthur Shapiro, a local attorney in the firm (then)
Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren, was murdered March 6,
1985 in a homicide having strong marks of a Mafia
(L.C.N.) "hit". The homicide remains unsolved at this

date.

While all alternatives remain open for investigation, the
homicide is considered to be and is being treated as a

| l 5 or

=$ =

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis.” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecompletel.

r,

The motive is unknown. Homicide Squad investigators
interviewed a number of associates, including the
immediate family of the victin. Consensus was that
Shapiro was a quiet, shy, private, secretive person and
tended to be a “loner”. No one could suggest a reason
for his murder.

It was learned that Shapiro was the subject of an
investigation by the Internal Revenue Service because he
had failed to file income tax returns for some seven
years prior to his death, and he had invested in some
questionable tax shelters.

The homicide occurred one day prior to Shapiro's
scheduled appearance before a Grand Jury in the I.R.S.
investigation, and there was some conjecture that Shapiro
was in position to provide information to the Grand Jury
that would have been damaging to some other party. The
identity of that party and the nature of that
information, however, could not be determined with any
certainty.

Given the Mafia "hit", another question is the identity
of an individual who had the necessary contacts in the
L.C.N.--and the personal financial resources--to buy the
contract.

Thus, while the motive remains unclear, the suspect is an
individual who (a) knew Shapiro and had some
personal/professional contact with him; (b) would benefit
from his death or from ensuring his silence; (c) had
close contact with L.C.N. figures or trusted L.C.N.
associates; and (d) had the personal financial resources
to afford the cost of the contract ("hit").

Edward DeBartolo is a real estate developer out of
Youngstown, Ohio, and is associated with Les Wexner of.
The Limited in Columbus. These subjects have a well-
known history of business and investment partnerships,
and in 1986, attempted jointly to acquire Carter-Hawley-
Hale Department Stores.

Francis J. "Frank" Walsh is owner and chief executive
officer of Walsh Trucking Company out of New Jersey.
Walsh Trucking is/has been primary transporter for The
Limited in Columbus. In July 1984, Walsh was being
investigated by the New York Organized Crime Task Force;
notices to this effect were addressed to Walsh at One
Limited Parkway, Columbus.

ste COPY

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth

Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro

Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis.” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https//archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecompletel.

Both DeBartolo and Walsh have been identified as
associates of the Genovese-LaRocca crime family in
Pittsburg (now called simply the Pittsburgh Family).

Thus, it can be determined that Les Wexner, through The
Limited, is associated with at least two (2) organized
crime figures who are associated with the Pittsburgh
crime family.

In 1990, a follow-up analytical study found that mr.
Hammond's jazz club and investment company were no longer
doing business, and Mr. Hammond had retired from City
Council. At Mr. Hammond's recommendation, the vice-
president of his jazz club, Ms Les Wright, was seated in
his vacancy in City Council.

DeBartolo and Walsh were still considered associates of
the Genovese-LaRocca crime family, and Walsh was still
providing truck transportation for The Limited. Robert
Morosky hed moved from The Limited to Allied Stores now
owned by Robert Campeau with financial backing fron
DeBartolo.

All other entities in the criginal study had co-located
in close proximity in the Huntington Center office
- building.

III CONCLUSION: HYPOTHESIS

From the predicate facts presented, it appears that Les Wexner
had established contact with .associates reputed to be
organized crime figures, one of whom was a major investment
partner and another was using The Limited headquarters as a
mailing address.

It is not known whether there are other such figures among
Wexner associates, but it car be hypothesized that the.
Genovese-LaRccca crime families might consider Wexner a

friend.

Like Arthur Shapiro was, Wexner is considered a very
secretive, very private person, and little is known about his
business transactions that might raise questions of ethics and
legality. For example, while it cannot be proved, it is
hypothesized that W_& K Partnership was an investment of
Wexner and Kessler in Jerry Hammond's jazz club hoping to
influence favorable zoning and annexation considerations for
"Wexley". At the very least, there would be some question of
ethics in this transaction. ,

m cory

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis.” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecompletet.

It was reported that Jerry Hammond purchased suite 405 in
Waterford Tower in August 1988, and there was some question of
whether Mr. Hammond's income at the time would support the
mortgage payments. Within the next 18 to 24 months, Mr.
Hammond left his position with City Council and with the gas
company, and the jazz club closed. According to the 1991
Haines directory, Mr. Hammond still resides at Waterford

Tower.

While transactions such as this would be questionable for
homicide, it is transactions such as this--and business
associates with organized crime ties-—-that lead to a question
ef ethics and legality of other unknown transactions and
associates with which Wexner. may be involved.

While there is no question of ethics or legality on the
surface, it is noted that some business organizations and
individuals have co-located and become submerged without
merging with Wexner and his varied business interests. Most
notable is Stanley Schwartz and the large Schwartz, Kelm,
Warren and Rubenstein law firm. It is not clear, for example,
why Stanley Schwartz would join the board of Omni oil with Les
Wexner whether or not the law firm represents The Limited.
While The Limited would be an important client, the large law
firm seems to remain independent of corporate bondage.

Thus, the concluding hypothesis is that Arthur Shapiro could
have answered too many of these sorts of questions, and might
have been forced to answer them in his impending Grand Jury
hearing; Stanley Schwartz might now be able to answer some of
the same questions for the same reason, but does not face a
Grand Jury, is immersed in the pattern himself, and now has a
powerful incentive to maintain discretion.

While the motive for the Shapiro homicide remains unclear, the
suspect is an individual who (a) knew Shapiro and had some
personal/professional contact with him; (b) would benefit from
his death or by ensuring his silence; (c) had close contact
with L.C.N. figures or trusted L.C.N. associates; and (d) had .
the personal financial rescurces to afford the cost of the
L.C.N. contract ("hit").

, C coPY

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis.’ The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecomplete1.

SHAPIRO HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION

fe

Link Diagram
1985 - 1990

THE ,LIMITED

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis.” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecomplete.

HUNTINGTON CENTER OFFICE BLDG,
41 SOUTH HIGH STREET

AUGUST, 1990

WEXNER INVESTMENT P.F., LEASING
JOHN W. KESSLER CO. |
— J Harold t
Levin,
NEW ALBANY CO, V. Pres,
JIRD FLOOR
RH 3390
| WEXNER FOUNDATION
23RD FLOOR

SCHWARTZ, KELM, WARREN & RUBENSTEIN
ATTORNEYS AT LAW

16TH FLOOR

SCHWARTZ, KELH, WARREN &
RUBENSTEIN
ATTORNEYS AT LAW

RH. 1675

WEXNER INVESTMENT
ONNI EXPLORATION
FIRST INTERCON, REAL

The full text of the Columbus police document written by Elisabeth
Leupp, an analyst with the Organized Crime Bureau, entitled “Shapiro
Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” The document
examines the murder of the lawyer Arthur Shapiro and focuses
extensively on Leslie Wexner and his associates.

https://archive.org/details/shapiromurderfilecomplete1.

INDEX

Index

A

Abbell, Michael 46, 64

Abedi, Agha Hasan 19, 176, 238

Acosta, Alex 20

Ainslie, Michael 80

Air America 240

Aitken, Jonathan 148, 167

Aksilenko, Valentin 336, 337

Alexander & Alexander (A&A) 96, 97
Alexander Howden group 96

Alito, Samuel Jr. 94

Allen, Charles 74, 78, 125, 175, 176, 336
Allen & Co 74, 336

Allen, Herbert 74, 78, 125, 175, 176, 336
Allen, Paul 284, 285, 327-330, 351

Alltel (formerly Systematics) 183
Amazon 338, 340

Amdocs 130

American Banker 188, 226

American Invesco 37, 38, 40, 44
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 115, 116, 137, 138, 360
American Jewish Year Book 113
AmeriCares 77, 96, 121

Andreessen Horowitz 285, 291, 346, 356
Andropov, Yuri 25

Anthony, Sheila 183

Antonio, Pan 27, Z8, 197, 199, 200, 248
API Group 284

Apollo Global Management 61, 68, 78, 122, 139, 173

Arafat, Yasser 127

Archer, Jeffrey 147, 148, 167

Arden, Alicia 269

Argus Corporation 131, 141

Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) 187, 188, 193, 211
Arkansas International Development Corporation II (AIDC II) 194
Arkansas Systems 187, 188, 193, 226

Arkla Inc 211, 231

Armoni, Avinoam 120

Arthur, Richard 178

Arvest 212

Asian Pacific Advisory Council (APAC) 209, 210

Atlas Corporation 131, 132, 141

AT&T 163, 321

Aurora Gasoline Company 74, 76

Automated Intelligence Systems Inc. (AISI) 203

Avery, Jake 125

Aviloop 267

Azulay, Avner 126

B

Bache & Company 6, Z

Backweb 331

Bacow, Lawrence 122

Baddeley, Jean 220

Baird, David G. 59, 131, 141, 175

Baker, Howard 153, 154

Baker, James III 62, 155, 246, 256

Baltimore Sun 110, 137, 138, 230

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) 209, 210
Band, Doug 50, 303, 304, 307, 309, 343
Bank Louis-Dreyfus 59

Bank of Credit and Commerce Hong Kong (BCCHK) 16, 17, 20

Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) 14, 16-19, 22, 34, 45, 46, 60,
68, 83, 126, 140, 153, 173, 176, 186, 190, 191, 19S, 227, 237, 238, 241, 245,
255, 259

Bank of New York (BoNY) 7

Barak, Ehud 21, 22, 53, 54, 67, 84, 114, 126, 127, 137, 140, 254, 284-286, 32
328, 331, 346, 349, 360, 361

Barenboim, Daniel 2

Barrack, Tom 49

Barr, Donald 2, 3

Barrett, Anthony 53, 54

Barrett, Jonathan 54

Barr, William 2, 3, 31

Barry, E.P. 101, 184

Barry, Maryanne Trump 49

Baumgold, Julie 66, 101, 104, 108, 137

Bayou Group 126

BCCI Affair, The 18, 34, 68, 140

Bear Stearns 4-6, 8-10, 12, 16, 18, 27, 55, 56, 72, 88, 96, 172, 22

Bechtel family 176

Begin, Menachem 110, 117, 126, 376

Bell, George 163, 321

Bellinger, Patricia 122

Benguet 175, 176

Ben-Gurion, David 110, 114

Ben-Menashe, Ari 20-22, 34, 130, 141, 146, 166

Bentsen, Lloyd Jr. 172, 190

Bentsen, Lloyd Sr. 172

Bernstein, Philip 65, 112

Berry, Eleanor 143

B

É

Beverly Enterprises 190

Beyer, James 178, 225

Bezos, Jeff 340, 354

bgC3 346, 347

Biden, Hunter 372

Biden, Joe 333, 342, 353, 370, 372, 378

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 212, 286, 319, 329, 342, 345, 346, 355

Bin Laden, Osama 159

Biomatics 347, 356

Birthright-Taglit 125

Bjorlin, Fary 272

Bjorlin, Nadia 272

Black, Conrad 50, 131, 132, 133, 141

Black Cube 322, 360

Black, Eli 78,

Black, George Montegu Jr. 131

Black, Leon 61, 101, 122, 173, 215, 224, 305, 334

Blair, Tony 15, 223

Blake, William 338

Bloch, Felix 25, 35

Block, Alan 35, 63, 102, 225, 231

Bloomberg 231, 260, 271, 316, 328, 347, 354, 368, 378

Bloomfield, Louis Mortimer 176

Blue World Alliance 345, 356

B'nai Brith International 82, 86, 111, 112

Bogen, Joseph 86

Bonk, Noa 279

Bonner, Yelena 332

Bonnouvrier, Jerome 265

Bordes, Pamella 17

Bovino, Kelly 334

Bower, Tom 220, 232

Brachetti Peretti, Ferdinando Maria 284

Branch, Peter 2, 4

Brandt, Elliot 115

Brantley, Martha 213,231

Brater, Mitchell 29

Brewton, Peter 39, 44, 62-64, 66, 69

Brian, Earl W. 22, 35, 41-43, 46, 52, 176, 336

Brin, Sergey SO, 340

Brockman, John 334-340, 353, 354

Brockman, Max 59, 73, 78, 79, 101, 103, 104, 107, 112, 114, 125, 128, 231, 331,
339

Bronfman, Charles 24, 74, 124, 125, 155, 217, 232, 331

Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World 68

Bronfman, Edgar 4, 6, 7, 9, 24, 44, 59, 60, 68, 74, 82, 112,
200, 217, 222

Bronfman family 125, 217

Bronfman, Matthew 222

Bronfman, Minda 59, 68

Brooks, Diana 81

Browne, John 210

Brown, Hank 18, 34, 140

Brown, John Y. 190

Brown, Michael 209

124-126, 155, 168, 175,

Brown, Ron 191, 192, 195, 200, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 230, 231, 248, 249, 2S1

Brownstein, Norman 40, 44, 45

Brunel, Jean Luc 54, 263-268, 287, 288, 309
Bryen, Stephen 133

Buchris, Pinchas 360, 361, 376

Buckley, William 132

Buffett, Jimmy 216

Burda, William F. 93

Bush, George H.W. 3, 44, 51, 61, 83, 155, 160
Bush, George W. 134-136, 254, 262, 304, 305
Bush, Jeb 46

Bush, Jonathan 160

Bush, Neil 44, 46

Business Insider 30, 36, 5S, 67, 10S, 233, 288, 339, 340, 353,

By the late John Brockman 335

C

Cabaret 147

Cabazon Indian Reservation 42, 43, 46, 63
Cadell, Pat 215

Calcalist Tech 322

Cameron, David 130, 141

Cam Gears Limited 12, 13

Campbell, Naomi 135, 268, 283, 304, 328

Capital Cities Communications 41, 63

Capone, Al 125

Carabbia, Ronald 93

Carbyne (software company) 84, 359, 360, 361, 362, 376

Carbyne911 (Reporty) 84, 284, 285, 328, 346, 359, 370

Carey, Hugh 30, 43, 44

Carillon Holdings 346

“Carolyn” (victim) 273, 276, 277, 341

Carr, Fred 39

Carter, Billy 131

Carter, Jimmy 131, 309, 336

Casey, William J. 10, 14, 18, 41, 63, 255, 258, 308

Casolaro, Danny 34, 46, 63, 64

Castle Bank and Trust 38, 63, 64, 82, 145, 176, 285, 296

Castro, Fidel 317

Cayne, James §

CBS News 21, 28, 35, 72

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 3, 10, 11, 14, 17-20, 24, 38, 41, 42, 55, 59, 60,
63, 68, 77, 82, 83, 96, 99, 103, 124, 128, 129, 131, 148, 149, 154, 159, 160,
165, 172, 175, 181, 182, 184, 208, 217, 224, 232, 235, 237-243, 252, 254-256,
258, 291, 297, 309, 317, 336, 337, 349, 363-368, 377, 378

Chamberlain, John 187

Chao-Ying, Liu 205, 206

Chartouni, Marijke 273

Check Point 331

Cheney, Dick 135

Chennault, Anna 235, 242, 243

Chertoff, Livia 83

Chertoff, Michael 83, 84, 361

Chesler, Louis 79, 175

Chicago Tribune 38, 63, 152, 200, 248, 250, 261

Chidiac, Charles 209, 210, 230

Chiliad 368, 369, 371, 378

Chinagate 188, 206, 207, 212, 213, 215, 218, 220, 243-246, 248, 251, 256, 333

China Resources (Chinese government's agent) 195, 227, 245, 250, 251, 256

Chinoy, Nazir 19

Christie’s 80, 81, 270

Christopher, Warren 127

Chung, Johnny Chien Chuen 203-206, 218, 229, 248, 252

Church, George 341, 347, 354, 356, 357

Churchill, Winston 74

Cicogna, Gianfranco 146-148, 158

Clay, Lucius D. 113

Clermont Club 8, 132, 150, 369

Cleveland Magazine 92, 105

Cleveland Plain Dealer 90

Clifford, Clark 173, 177, 180, 186, 204

Clinton, Bill Clinton 8, 16-18, 22, 33, 36, 50, 55, 57, 66, 67, 119, 121, 123, 126-
131, 139, 140, 141, 155, 160, 171-174, 188, 189-197, 199, 200-202, 205-207,
209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218-233, 235, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 251-255,
257, 260-262, 280, 281, 283, 290, 295, 296, 299, 301-313, 315-318, 322, 332,
338, 342-345, 349, 353, 355, 356, 372, 376

Clinton, Chelsea 313, 343

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 123, 303, 313, 343

Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) 343

Clinton, Hillary 66, 178-183, 186, 187, 203-205, 211, 222, 223, 233, 257, 296,
315, 317, 322, 344, 345, 355, 372

Cloherty, Patricia 42

Cockburn, Andrew 142, 219, 232

Cogswell, Steve 208

Cohen, Stephen 137, 140, 366

Cohn, Roy 17, 18, 24, 25, 33-35, 41, 48, 49, 65, 132, 154, 165, 175, 222

Columbus Dispatch 84-87, 104, 105, 235, 236, 239, 240, 259, 260

Commercial Credit Mortgage Company 47

CommTouch 321-331, 350-352

Continuity of government (COG) 363

Control Data Corporation (CDC) 46, 47, 64, 333

Cooper Union 1, 273

Cooper, William 14

Corbally, Thomas 149, 160

Corson, Maurice 111, 112, 137

Corson, Robert $1, 62

Cosmos Bank 175, 224

Costello, Frank 41

Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (CJF) 112
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) 60, 61, 68, 121
Covenant House 77, 96, 121

Crain's New York 54, 57, 59, 66

Cray Research 333

Cray, Seymour 333

Crocker, Douglas II 38-40

Crown, Henry 125, 132, 224

Crown, Lester 125, 175, 331

Crown Zellerbach 8

Cumpsty, John 113, 137

Cuomo, Andrew 156

Cuomo, Mario 28, 44, 64, 156-158, 168

Cyren 323, 330, 350, 352

D

Daihatsu International Trading Corp 197, 198, 19

Daily Beast, The 29, 31, 34, 35, 53, 65, 67, 169, 174,
291, 314, 353-356

Daily Mail 81, 161, 169, 173, 189, 213, 272, 282, 294, 295, 314

Daily Mirror 21, 144

Daily Telegraph 132, 166

Dalitz, Moe 125, 175, 224

Dalton School 2-5, 31

Danziger, Itsik 331, 352

Dark Alliance 20

Darktrace 370, 378

DARPA 251, 333, 364
Data Broadcasting Corp 43
Davidson, James 179, 226

Davies, Nick 21, 167

Dawkins, Richard 340

DeBartolo, Edward J. Jr 40, 44,

DeBartolo, Edward Sr 88, 92, 93

DeCamp, John 102

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK 224

de Gunzburg, Alain 59

Dellal, Jack 369, 378

Democratic National Committee (DNC) 189, 191-196, 199,
215-219, 232, 248, 251, 254, 305

Dennett, Daniel 340

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 370

Deroo, John 85

Dershowitz, Alan 122, 222, 332

DeSanti, Donato 95

Desert Inn 175, 224

Detroit: Race and Uneven Development 75

Deuss, John 55, 67, 214, 282, 284

Deutsch, David 338

Deutsche Bank 160, 221

DeVoe, Jack Raymond 82

Dickinson, Janice 268

Dickson, Peter Maxwell 14

Dillon, Joseph F. 86

Dillon, Martin 35, 64, 86, 167, 168, 169, 262, 326

Dime Savings Bank of New York 52, 61, 66

Dimon, Jamie 88

Discipline and Punish 363

Dizengoff, Alex 360

Djerassi, Alexander 345, 356

Domb, Sam 218, 219

Donovan, William J. 131

Douglas, Michael 216

Drexel Burnham Lambert 8, 38-40, 46, 64, 125, 215

Driver, Jennifer 214, 215

Drysdale Government Securities 11, 23

Z9, 23; 24, 103, 105, 172, 224
2

Dubin, Eva Andersson 214, 263, 265, 272, 281
Dubin, Glenn 122, 139

Dubin, Tiffany 270

Duff, Patricia 215, 216

du Pré, Jacqueline 2, 293

Dyer, Marjorie 87

Dynamic Energy 209, 210, 211, 212

Dyson, Esther 332, 333, 339, 353, 354

Dyson, Freeman 338, 352

E

Economist, The 372, 379

Edge Group 319, 334, 335, 338-341, 347, 353, 354, 373
Editas 347, 357

Edtimiades, Nicholas 195

Edward, Bradley 177

Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation 92

Edwards, Brad 50, 267

eGenesis 347, 356

Eisenberg, Calvin 39, 40

Eisenberg, Joseph L 86, 104, 257, 258
Eisenhower, Dwight D 77

Eitan, Rafi 128, 322, 323, 350, 363

Electronic Intifada 35, 134

Electronic Realty Associates Inc. (ERA) 46, 47, 64
Elichai, Amir 360

Elissar, Eliahu Ben 127

Elite Model Management 105, 135, 266, 283, 287, 289,
E.L. Rothschild LP 222

Emery Air Freight 27

Emil, Arthur D. 44

Empire Trust Company 7, 32

Energy Systems Company, The (ENESCO) 54

Enron 80

k

Epstein, Jeffrey 1-3, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 28, 29-36, 47, 48, 53, SS, 57, 65-69,
Z2, 78, 81, 89, 95, 96, 101, 102, 104-106, 114, 116, 118, 121, 124, 129, 130,
136, 144, 149, 154-157, 159, 160, 162, 164-167, 169-173, 180, 186, 188, 204,
210, 213, 218, 220, 222, 224-226, 231-233, 235, 240, 243, 246, 248, 249, 253,
256, 260, 263-266, 271-275, 278, 284, 287-290, 293, 294, 296, 301, 304, 307,
312, 314-317, 321, 328, 330, 338, 339, 341, 343, 345, 346, 349, 353-356, 359,
372, 373, 376, 378, 379

Epstein, Mark 1, 2, 53, 266

Epstein/Maxwell 28, 181, 271, 278, 279, 280

Epstein, Paula 1, 31,231

Epstein, Seymour 1

Erlich, Yigal 321, 322

Erskine, Alex 55

E-Systems 182

European, The 149

Evening Standard 11, 32, 65, 163, 170, 240, 259, 277, 287, 290, 29S, 297, 298,
319, 320, 331, 349

Ewing, Karen 189, 213

[k

F

Facebook 35, 291, 338, 340, 361

Faith, Nicholas 265

Farmer, Annie 271

Farmer, Maria 271, 281, 320, 349

Fastalliances: Power Your E-Business 329, 351

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 20, 25, 34, 58, 68, 81, 85, 93, 105, 128, 130,
133, 140, 141, 160, 178, 184, 185, 189, 210, 212, 225, 230, 258, 299, 315, 336,
337, 368, 369

Fedus-Fields, Cindy 270

Feith, Douglas 133, 252, 253

Férnandez, Antonio García 11

Filthy Rich 11, 32

Financial General Bankshares 153

Financial Times 134, 357, 360, 376

Finkelstein, James 222

Fiorina, Carly 369

First National Bank of Louisville 190

Fisher, Ivan 61, 62

Fisher, Max 35, 59, 73-79, 81-84, 101, 103, 104, 107, 112, 114, 125, 126, 128, 1
175, 260, 331

Fisher, Paula Heil $

Fiske, Robert 177

Fitrakis, Bob 66, 87, 88, 90, 91, 101, 104, 10S, 129, 141, 142, 239-242, 259, 260

Fitts, Catherine Austin 241

Fleiss, Heidi 274, 289

Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) 93

Flying Tiger Line 235

Flying Tigers 235, 238, 242, 243

Forbes 32, 66, 102, 140, 181-184, 224, 226, 288, 307, 316, 377

Forbes, Malcolm 32, 184

Ford, Gerald 77, 101, 121

Ford, Henry II 75-79

Ford, Tom 268, 288

Forester, Lynn ( Lynn Forester de Rothschild) 57, 220-223, 233, 328, 342

Forexster Limited $5, 56, 67

Fortune 38, 63, 77, 233

Fostergate 181-187, 226, 257, 333

Foster, Lisa 183

Foster, Vince 177-187, 204, 225, 226, 257

Foucault, Michel 363

Fowler, Don 194, 195, 216

Fox Business §

FOX News 130

Frank, Cathy 222

Fratianno, Jimmy 93

Freeman, Lawrence 82, 337, 352

French Connection 61

Friedan, Betty 3

Friedman, Herbert 84, 113, 114, 137

G

Gafni, Shelley 214

GAGE Corporation 211, 212
Gandhi, Mahatma 223
Garrison, Jennifer 214, 236

Garten, Jeffrey 192

Gates, Bill 12, 163, 285, 286, 302, 312, 315, 319, 320, 327, 329, 334,

342, 344-347, 353-357
Gates, Melinda 344, 345
Gates Foundation 212, 286, 311, 319, 329, 342-347, 349, 355
Gell-Mann, Murray 337, 338
Gemini Israel Ventures 322-324, 349, 350
General Dynamics 131, 132
Genovese crime family 92, 94
GeoMiliTech 82, 190, 255
Gergen, David 121-123, 139
Getty, Ann 79
Gibraltar Savings 38
Gillespie, Hugh Edwin $5, 67
Giroday, Jean de la 190
Giroir, C. Joseph 191-195, 197
Giuffre, Virginia 50, 122, 210, 214, 266, 274, 277, 290, 298, 299,
Giussani, Luca 146
Glass, Frederick 175
Glencore 55
Glenn, Rudolph 33, 86, 139
Globes 324, 327, 350
Go2Net 327
Goetzman, Robert 185
Golden, Peter 73, 101
Goldman, Guido 59, 60, 68
Goldman, Nahum $9
Goldman Sachs 151, 171, 172, 224
Goldsmith, Gerald 8, 174-177, 180, 186

Goldsmith, Isabel 8

Goldsmith, James 2, 8, 132, 150, 271, 369

Good, Kenneth M. 44, 45, 317

Google 50, 330, 332, 338, 340, 345, 347, 361, 371
Gorbachev, Mikhail 25

Gore, Al 127, 196, 202-204, 216, 307, 332

Goren, Eduardo Titelman 120

Gormley, William 208

Gouletas-Carey, Evangeline 18, 30, 43, 46, 47

Gouletas, Victor and Nicholas 37-41, 43-47, 53, 99

Govtech Summit 370

Grabbe, J. Orlin 184-186

Grace, J. Peter 77, 96

Grand Bahamas Development Company (DEVCO) 79, 175, 176

Gratitude America Limited 12, 265

Gray, Robert Keith 17, 18, 47, 140, 153-155, 168, 235, 242, 243, 307

Great Wall Industries 206, 244, 251, 252

Greenberg, Alan “Ace” 4, S, 9, 10, 24, 72, 354, 355, 377, 378

Green, Ernie 1, 141, 201, 204, 248-250

Green, Steven 305, 307, 316

Groff, Lesley 280, 290

Gross, David 65, 132, 134, 141, 142, 265

Grossman, Paul 4

Grosz, Joseph 40

Guardian 33, 138, 162, 167, 169, 172, 220, 232, 264, 287, 289, 315, 320, 325, 329,
334, 335, 353, 378, 379

Gucci 268

Guggenheim, Eileen 271

Guinness, Edward 280

Gulfstream Land & Development Corp, 44, 56,
Gunzburg, Minda de 59, 60, 68

Gutfruend, John 215

IS

H

Haaretz 137, 140, 324, 325, 330, 349, 350
Hadron 41, 42

Haganah 83, 97, 114

Haines, Avril 370

Haley, Maria 192

Halper, Daniel 65, 129, 315

Hambro International Bank 42

Hamilton, George 148, 149, 160, 167, 176
Hamilton, William 41, 42, 368

Hammer, Armand 79, 153, 308

Hammer, Julius 153

Hammond, Jerry 88, 91, 92

Hampson, Thomas 195

Hancock, Matt 370

Harris, Shane 366, 377

Harvard Crimson 118, 121, 122, 139, 173, 224, 378
Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership (CPL) 121-123
Hassenfeld, Sylvia 217, 232

Hastert, Dennis 136, 142

Haute, Donald 177, 178

Hayden, David 162

Hayes, Chalmer “Charles” 184, 226

Hazell, Claire (Claire Iveagh) 280, 281, 286
Heath, Ted 145

Heifer International 212, 231

Helliwell, Paul 14, 38, 63, 64, 82, 103, 176
Hernandez-Cartaya, Guillermo 172, 190, 224
Hernandez-Cartaya, Marcelo 172

Hersh, Seymour 21, 133, 141

Herzog, Chaim 132

Hewlett-Packard 369

Hill and Knowlton 154

Hiller Robert L. 110-112, 137

Hillis, Danny 56, 333

Hillman, Gerald 134

Hines, Gerald D. $1, 52

Hip Hing Holdings 191

Hockersmith, Kaki 179, 180

Hoffa, Jimmy 175

Hoffenberg, Steven S, 11, 12, 15-17, 21, 26-30, 36, 47, 48, 50, 99, 293

Hoffman, Jeffrey 29, 33, 35

Hoffman, Kathyrn 207

Hoffman, Reid 340

Hollander, Roy Den 160, 221

Hollinger International 131-135, 141, 253, 365

Horn, Myles J. 53

Ho, Stanley 201, 202, 228, 229

Houraney, George 49

Houston Post 52

Hoy, Patrick 33

Hsia, Maria 196, 202

Huang, Johnny 188-196, 201, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 218, 227, 245, 246, 248,
254

Hubbell, Webster 193, 210, 211, 216

Huffington Post 342

Human Rights Watch e7

Humphreys, J. Herbert 82, 103

Hussein, Saddam 133

iCognito (now Pure Sight) 331

IDC Herzliya 24, 25, 38, 175, 176

IMB Capital 46, 47

Imperial Savings and Loan 38-41, 53, 63
Independent 17, 33, 64, 101, 142, 230, 316, 355
Information on Demand 162, 320, 326
Information, The 339

InformationWeek 55

In-Q-Tel 365, 366, 377

Insight (magazine) 129, 141

Inslaw 41, 42, 63, 177, 363, 368

Intellectual Ventures 334

Intercontinental Assets Group (IAG) 10, 11, 89, 96

Intercontinental Realty 89, 90, 104

Interlochen Centre for the Arts in Michigan 1, 271, 272, 288

International Trade Administration (ITA) 188, 192, 193, 195, 207, 208, 212, 230

Iran-Contra scandal 3, 14, 15, 82, 83, 99, 103, 153, 154, 237, 238, 240, 243, 244,
255, 262, 326, 363, 364, 377

Israel Defense Force (IDF) 323, 360

Israel, Fortuna (Madame Tuna) 17

Israel, Samuel III 126

Israel-U.S. Bi-national Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD)
B22, 323

Israel Venture Network (IVN) 331, 352

Ito, Joi 334, 339

J

Jackson, Henry “Scoop” 133

Jackson, James 87

Jacobs, Richard 153

Jain, Aki 366

Janoski, Kathleen 208, 230

Jardine, Francis $5, 214, 281, 284

Jardine Matheson & Co 201

JAS Liquidation Inc. 89, 104

Jay, Peter 149

Jefferson Savings and Loan 172

Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge (Green Lake Lodge) 1, 271

J. Epstein & Co. 10, 53, 54

Jerusalem Post 25, 35, 103, 15S, 168, 170, 326, 331, 349, 351, 359
Jewish Agency 59, Z7, 83, 84, 101, 114, 125, 217, 331

Jewish Chronicle 104, 109, 137, 351

Jewish Telegraphic Agency 9, 32, 103, 104, 116, 138, 140, 168, 232, 350
Jewish Weekly 324, 325

Johnson, Boris 148

Johnson, Don 216

Johnson, Stanley and Rachel 148

Johnston, Maurice (Robert) 13, 233, 354, 377
Jones, Julia Hughes 197

Jones, Rick Allen 345

Jordan, Vernon 216, 231

JPMorgan 88, 344, 347

Judicial Watch 209, 230

Jueren, Shen 196, 251

Juilliard School 272

Junkermann, Nicole 135, 283-285, 328, 351, 360, 361, 370
Jun, Wang 200, 206, 247-251

K

K2

Intelligence 160

Kahn, Irvin 175, 225

Kaminsky, Stephen 207

Kanter, Burton 14, 38, 39, 63, 64
Kanuth, Bob 217, 232

Karin Models 263, 264, 266, 309
Karp, Alex 363, 365-367
Katelman, Fern 111

Kates, Faith 264, 265

Katz, Harold 257, 262, 323
Kearny, Jude 199

Keating, Charles 39, 40, 45, 46, 64
Kellen, Mary 279

Kellen, Sarah 273, 279, 281, 286, 304, 307, 339
Kennedy, Jim 310

Kennedy, Joseph P. 156
Kennedy, Joe II 156, 157
Kennedy, John F. Jr. 156, 158, 169

Kennedy, Kerry 156-158
Kennedy, Robert F. 156-15
Kennedy, Robert F. Jr. 158,
Kerry, John 18, 34, 140, 203

Kessler, John W. “Jack” 88

Kessler, Ronald 17, $1, 84-88, 90, 92, 95, 104
Keswick family 202

Ketcham, Chris 130, 141, 377

Keyser Ullman 369

9
159

KGB 25, 151, 219, 336, 337

176, 214, 218, 244, 282, 328
Khashogg, Petrina 328
Kimche, David 257, 331
Kimmel, Sidney 176
King, Larry 80, 238
Kissinger, Henry 24, 60, 132, 141, 154, 222, 233, 309
Kleman, Leah 271
Klum, Heidi 268, 288
Knights of Malta 77, 146
Koehler, Robert 22
Kogan, Dylan 265
Kohler, Edward 28
Kollek, Teddy 9, 120, 217
Koppel, Abigail 97
Koppel, Yehuda 83
Kornbluth, Jesse 11, 32
Korshak, Sidney 125
Korski, Daniel 370, 376, 378
Kroll Associates 149, 160, 221
Kroll, Jules 149, 159, 160
Kryuchkov, Vladimir 25
Kuomintang (KMT) 201
Kushner, Jared 48
Kuvin, Spencer T. 279

L

La Cosa Nostra (LCN) 91
La Costa Club 63, 64
Lador, Moshe 120

Lady Ghislaine 48, 186

Lander, Eric 333, 341, 353
Landon, Curt 31, 66, 104, 290, 315

Lansky, Meyer 79, 93, 94, 126, 128, 175, 241

Lauder, Ronald 24, 25, 35, 38, 52, 133, 222, 331
Lay, Ken 80

L Brands 122, 269

Leach, Jim 182

Leese, Douglas 11-17, 26, 29, 32, 33, 244, 249, 254, 265, 300
Leese, Jane Primrose 13

Leese, Julian 12, 13, 26, 265

Leese, Nicholas 16

Leese, Nick 12, 167

Lehman Brothers 80, 151, 201, 248, 24
Lekem (agency) 323
Leshem, Lital 360

Lessin, Jessica 339, 340
Leupp, Elizabeth A. 87
Lev, Amir 323

Levine, Dennis B. 7, 8, 10,
Levin, Harold 51, 89, 90, 9
Lewek, James 208
Lewinsky, Monica 129, 141, 216
Liebman, Charles S. 112, 113, 137
Lilley, Peter 172

Lincoln Savings 39, 40,

Linden, Dana Weschler 184

Lindner, Carl Jr. 81, 82, 102, 103
Lindsey, Bruce 101, 195, 303

Lippo Group 16, 190-195, 197, 199, 227,
Lipson, Brenda 336

Liquid Funding 55

Livingston, Craig 178

Llama Company 211, 212

Loeb, John 7

London & Overseas 146

Lonrho 369

Lorad Company 13-15, 33, 244

Loral Space Systems 206, 207, 229, 251-253, 261, 262, 365

ho

NO [Oo
o g
N
= N
A

>
S

Lord Granby 145

Lord Rothschild 132

Los Angeles Times 6, 7, 32, 63, 64, 105, 128, 140, 225, 227-229, 246, 247, 260, 261,
317, 351

Loutchansky, Grigori 218, 219, 232

LS Power 54, 55, 67

Lucchesi, Andy 49

Luminus Capital Partners $5

Luminus Capital Partners Master Fund 55

Luminus Energy Partners SS

Lum, Nora and Eugene 209-212

Lum, Trisha 209

Luntz, Frank 134

Luskinen, Seppo 56

M

Macioce, Thomas A. 41

Magaziner, Ira 303, 343

Magellan (search engine) 162-164, 169, 170, 321, 327, 349, 351
Maguire, Kelly 58

Mail on Sunday 31, 65, 156, 167, 290, 314
Main Core 363, 364, 374

Mainland Savings 62

Major Realty 79, 103

Malina, Roger 162, 345, 356

Mandelson, Peter 50

Manners, David 145

Mantel, Gideon 323-325, 328, 352
Mar-a-Lago 49, 50, 274, 294, 298

Marcello, Carlos 93

Marcinkova, Nadia 267, 278, 286, 287, 290
Marcos family 51, 148, 149, 160, 167, 176, 225
Marcos, Ferdinand 148

Marcos, Imelda 148, 149

Marcum, Curtis K 87

Marguleas, Howard 78

Marquez, James 126

Marshall, Jonathan 224, 225

Martinez, Leonel 46

Matson, Katinka 340

Mavroleon, Basil “Bluey” 146

Mavroleon, Carlos 158, 169

Mavroleon, Nicholas 146

Maxwell, Betty 3, 143, 161, 165, 264, 325

Maxwell, Christine 162, 163, 320, 321, 325, 326, 345, 368

Maxwell Communications Corp 172

Maxwell Communications Network 151, 172, 330, 352

Maxwell Corporate Gifts 152

Maxwell, Ghislaine 19, 21, 23, 31, 32, 48-S1, 58, 6S, 66, 68, 81, 100, 102, 118, 129,
143-149, 1S1, 152, 154, 156-161, 163-170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 186, 214, 225,
233, 243, 254, 260, 263, 264, 266-269, 271-275, 277, 279-283, 285, 288-290,
293-299, 304, 306, 307, 312, 314, 316-318, 320, 321, 325, 326, 330, 332, 339-
342, 345, 354, 355, 368, 372, 373

Maxwell, Ian 143, 161, 220

Maxwell, Isabel 8, 162, 163, 288, 320, 321, 324-332, 345, 349-352, 368

Maxwell, Kevin 163, 220, 368

Maxwell, Michael 143

Maxwell, Robert 7, 8, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 35, 46, 48, S2, 61, 64, 121, 128, 132,
143-145, 149-157, 159-162, 165-168, 170-172, 215, 219, 220, 222, 224, 255,
257, 259, 262-264, 294, 314, 320, 322, 324-326, 330, 333, 337, 349, 350, 363,
368, 369

Maxwell: The Final Verdict 220, 232

Mays, Richard 218

MC2 (model agency) 266

McCaw, Craig 342

McCoy, Alfred 32, 36

McCracken, Ed 332

McCurry, Michael D. 181

McGrath, Kevin 44, 64

McKinley Group 162-164, 170, 320, 321, 327, 349, 351, 368

McLarty, Thomas “Mack” 188, 194, 211, 342

McNulty, Paul 116

M.D.C. Holdings 39, 40, 43, 44, 45

Medavoy, Michael 216

Media Bypass 182-184, 226

Mega Group 24, 66, 109, 124-129, 131, 155, 156, 166, 175, 186, 20S, 217, 218,
222, 331

Meissner, Charles 192, 207

Meister, Robert 96, 97, 99, 105

Meister, Wendy 97

Menuhin, Yehudi 2

Meridor, Sallai 77

Merkel, Angela 123

Merritt, Jerry 98

Messing, F. Andrew 82

Meyer, Bernard 174

Meyers, Betsy 32, 101, 103, 123, 137, 168, 232

MI6 160

Michaels, James 182

Microsoft Corporation 163, 284-286, 319-321, 327-334, 336, 338, 340, 342, 344,
346, 351, 353, 355, 361

Microsoft Network [MSN] 163, 170, 321, 327, 328, 349, 351

Middleton, Mark 188-191, 194, 199, 201, 203, 204, 206, 211-215, 218, 227, 231,
244, 245, 247, 248, 253, 254, 258, 283, 306, 342

Midelfart, Celina 214, 283

Milken, Michael 38-40, 46, 125, 149, 302, 307

Miller, Ron 212

Milstein, Seymour 78, 82

MintPress News 33, 34, 103, 141, 166, 233, 240, 241, 291, 315, 349, 369, 376, 377

Mirror Group 144, 146, 151, 166

Mischer, Walter 51, 52, 62

Mitchell, George 29, 131, 210, 212, 214, 246, 283, 334

MIT Media Lab 334, 344

Mizel, Larry 39, 40, 63

Mlavsky, Ed 322, 323, 349, 350

Mogilevich, Semion 7, 48, 146, 151, 219

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Moldea, Dan 79, 93, 94, 102, 105, 227

Morabia, Nan 46

Morgan, Jeff 64

Moriarty, W. Patrick 20

Morosky, Robert 88, 98

Mortman, Lisa 213

Morton, Bill 67, 207

Moses, Larry 111

Mosimann, Anton 148, 167

Mossad 15, 33, 34, SS, 66, 83, 103, 126-129, 141, 146, 160, 161, 166, 176, 185,
257, 258, 291, 297, 326, 331, 349, 377, 378

Mother Jones 8, 32, 35, 64

Murdoch, Rupert 132, 148, 149

Murdock, David 80

Music Corporation of America (MCA) 125, 153, 196, 308

Musk, Elon SS, 57, 67, 329, 340, 342

Musk, Kimbal 55

Myhrvold, Nathan 331-334, 339, 353, 354

N
Narativ 34, 360, 362, 376
Narus 361

National Economic Council (NEC) 171

National Emergency Number Association (NENA) 359

National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 24

National Health Service (NHS) 370

National Security Agency (NSA) 127, 128, 182, 184, 193, 219, 226, 331, 355,
360, 361, 376 181

Nation, The 133, 140, 141, 262

Neil, Andrew 148

Netanyahu, Benjamin 24, 120, 125, 127, 129, 133, 138, 140, 141, 252

Netanyahu, Yonatan 120

Neufeld, Carl and Sandra 86

New Albany Property 51, 88, 90, 91, 95, 105

Newstar 153

New Times 174, 224, 260

New York Daily News 28, 61, 69, 121, 152

New York Magazine 1, 4, S, 16, 31, 50, 52, 56, 63, 66, 88, 91, 101, 104, 10-109, 137,
315, 365

New York Post 28, 31, 65, 101, 127, 140, 152, 156, 168, 265, 269, 288-290, 315,
354, 356

New York Times 4, 25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 44, 49, 57, 62-69, 72, 79, 95, 101-103,
105, 107, 114, 118, 137, 138, 140, 141, 148, 150, 166-170, 177, 179, 180, 206,
221, 225-227, 229-233, 251-253, 256, 261, 262, 274, 277, 279, 288-290, 307,
314, 316, 323, 325, 336, 337, 340, 341, 344, 349-351, 353-355, 363, 366, 367,
371, 377, 379

New York University (NYU) 1

Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) (platform) 361, 362

Next model agency 218, 264, 265, 268, 269, 290, 296, 352, 361, 376

Ng Lap Seng, 197-202, 20S, 206, 248-250

Nichols, John Booth 42, 126, 154

Nielsen, Kirstjen 361

Nikolic, Boris 286, 345-348, 356, 357

Nixon Richard 77, 121, 141, 154, 223

N.M. Rothschild 151, 161

No Bull: My Life in and out of the Markets 126

Nordex 219, 220

Norman, James R. 40, 44, 181-184, 186, 187, 224, 226, 308, 317

North, Oliver 46, 82, 240, 363

Nowak, Martin 371

Nussbaum, Bernard 178, 182

O

Oakland Tribune 64.

Obama, Barack 345

Obregon, Anna 11, 23

Occidental Petroleum 79, 153, 308
Odlum, Floyd 131, 132, 141

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 2, 7, 44, 103, 125, 131, 186
Oil Card, The 187, 226

Oklahoma Natural Gas (ONG) 210, 211

Oldfield, Bruce 157, 169

O’Leary, Hazel 205

Omni Oil 88-90

Onassis, Aristotle 37

O’Neill, John P. 160, 169

Operation Magic Carpet 83

Operation Moses 83, 103

Operation Polar Cap 45, 46

Operation Solomon 83

Orlova, Lyoubov 214

Orovitz, Max 79, 103

Ossa Properties $3, 54, 57, 214, 266, 267, 282, 284, 290
Owen, Robert 46

Oxford United 144, 166

P

Pagels, Heinz 338

Pagnotti, Louis 54

Palantir 291, 359, 361-363, 365-371, 376-378
Palm Beach Daily News 22, 34, 225
Palm Beach Post 65, 216, 232,289
Palmer, Allan George 24

Pardo, Tamir 331

Park, Tongsun 154

Parkview Financial $1, 52, 59
Parsons, Richard 52, 66
Pasternak, Anna 147, 167

Pastora, Eden 46

Patterson, James 11, 32

Payne, Lawrence 208

People, The 144, 145

People’s Bank of China 188, 193

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 15, 244, 247, 250

Perelman, Ron 8, 39, 193, 215, 216, 222, 231

Peres, Shimon $4, 122, 139, 331, 351, 352

Pergamon Press 144, 154

Perle, Richard 132-135, 252, 253, 365

Perlman, Itzhak 2

Peters, Vincent “Jimmy” 78

Petrie, Milton 71, 72, 79, 80

PFI Leasing 51, 89, 90, 104

Pharaon, Ghaith 46, 60

Phillips, W.E. 131

Pincus, Louis 83, 103, 323, 350

Pindling, Lynden O. 176

Pinker, Steven 340

Pirie, Robert S. 8, 150, 151, 152

Pivar, Stuart 8, 271

Pizza Connection 62

Playboy 33, 279

Plaza Hotel 48, 49, 165

Poindexter, John 364-367, 377

Pollard, Jonathan 128, 129, 140, 141, 321, 323, 350

Price of Power, The 133, 141

Prince Andrew (Duke of York) 2, 15, 33, 34, 50, 170, 272, 280, 284, 285, 290, 291,
293-301, 312-315, 317, 319, 346

Proctor, Harvey 145-148, 166

Project for a New American Century (PNAC) 135

PROMIS, 19, 34, 41, 42, 47, 52, 63, 126, 128, 151, 154, 162, 176, 177, 186, 222,
320, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327, 359, 362, 363, 368, 369

Prosperi, A. Paul 174, 216

Purple Gang 74

Puscau, Alina 265, 269

Putin, Vladimir 48, 123

Q

Qihan Biotech 347, 357
Quark and the Jaguar, The 337
Queen Elizabeth II 2, 79, 300
Quiet Diplomat 73, 101

Quinn, Jack 127
R

Rabin, Leah 111

Rabin, Yitzhak 111, 117

Radar 260, 363, 377

Rahim, Begum Asghair 19

RAND Corporation 256

Ransome, Sarah 277, 278, 279, 290

Rappaport, Bruce 7, 14, 146, 217

Rauch, Sheila Brewster 157

Ravitch, Richard 3

Ray, Kimberly 205

Raymond, Roy 62, 82, 268

Raz, Arik 120

Razek, Ed 269

Reagan, Ronald 18, 24, 41, 42, 82, 121, 132, 133, 153, 155, 185, 215, 243, 309,
363, 364

Reality Club (Edge) 338

Reeder, G. Wayne 42, 43, 46

Relentless Pursuit 177, 225, 287

Remote Mortgage Origination (RMO) 46, 47

Republic National Bank 46, 82

Research on Demand 162

Revlon 8, 216

Reynolds, Jonathan C. III 22

Riady, James 16, 17, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 197, 201, 205-207, 220, 245, 246,
249, 250, 256, 300, 307

Riady, Mochtar 190

Richardson, Bill 131, 222, 283, 334

Richardson, Mary 158, 159, 169
Rich, Denise 105, 126, 127
Rich, Ella 86, 95

Rich, Marc 22, 35, SS, 65, 68, 126, 140, 214, 21
Riconosciuto, Michael 19, 20
Riklis, Meshulam 59

Ritter, Bruce 149, 235

Rizzo, Rinaldo 122

Road Ahead, The 331

Roberts, Peter 360

Roberts, Virginia (see Giuffre) 50, 266, 274, 290, 298, 314, 355
Robson, Haley 274, 275, 289

Rockefeller, David 61, 176

Rockefeller, Laurance 176

Rockefeller Foundation 291, 346, 356
Rockefeller, Nelson $2, 311

Rodriguez, Alfredo 277

Rogers & Wells 10

Romney, George 73, 74

Romney, Mitt 73

Rose Law 191, 193, 211

Rosenbaum, Tibor 176

Rosenstiel, Lewis $8, 59, 74, 165, 222
Rosenthal, Benjamin 38

Rosoff, Michael 29

Rosovsky, Henry 116-118, 138, 172

Rosovsky, Nitza 117, 138

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Rosser, Nigel 11, 17, 32, 170, 259, 297-299, 314, 319, 320, 329, 349
Ross, Steve $2
Rothkopf, David 192
Rothschild, Edmond de 46, 60, 82, 112, 176, 331
Rothschild, Evelyn de 150, 222, 331
Rothschild family 150
Rothschild Inc. 8, 150-152
Rowland, Roland Walter “Tiny” 369

Royer, Chris 268

Roys, Etienne des 266

Rubenstein, Richard 88, 89, 243
Rubin, Richard 119, 171-173, 213, 283
Rubloff, Arthur 78, 79

Rumsfeld, Donald 134, 135, 253
Russo, Joe 52

S

Safra, Edmond 46, 82, 112

Sakharov, Andrei 332, 352

Sakhia, Abdur 19

Salas, Esther 160, 169, 221

Salerno, Ralph 92, 94

Samax Trading Company 88-90

San Jacinto Savings 39, 40, 43

San Kin Yip International Trading Company 199

Sassoon family 202

Savile, Jimmy 145, 301

Schwab, Klaus 123, 124, 139

Schwartz, Bernard 88, 89, 92, 138, 206, 207, 251-253, 365

Scotto, Anthony M. 44, 64

Scott, Peter Dale 224, 226, 317

Scott, Walter Jr. 80

Seagram Company Ltd 6-9, 32

Seagram's Seagram Company Limited 6, 7

Seal, Barry 184

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 6-10, 27, 28, 41,
225, 350, 352, 377

Segal, Erel 114

Segal, Mikhail 54, 67, 114

Segal, Paul 54, 67

Selco East Consultants 21

Seligman, J.W. 59, 60

Seymour, Cheri 20, 34, 46, 63, 64
Seymour, Christine 18, 49

Shackley, Ted 55, 214, 219, 232, 282
Shalev, Zev 21, 34, 376

Shamir, Yair 330

Shamir, Yitzhak 330

Shapiro, Arthur 52, 66, 84-95, 98, 104, 105, 107
Shapiro Murder File 66, 88-95, 104, 10S
Sharfman, Nahum 323
Shengde, Ji 206

Shenker, Morris 175, 225
Sherman, Jane 84, 331
Sherwood, Robert 315
Shields, Lisa 60

Shin Bet 258, 362
Shnayerson, Michael 157, 168, 169
Shvets, Yuri 336, 337
Shwed, Gil 331, 352
Silicon Graphics 332, 333, 352, 353

Silverado S&L 39, 40, 43-46, 63, 64

Simon, William E. 121

Singlaub, John 82, 103, 190

60 Minutes 186, 264, 287

Slyper, Amos 120, 139

Smathers, George 38

Smith, Dale 22

Smith, Earl 241

Smith, Gayle 303, 309

Smith, Grant 116, 137, 138, 350

Smith, Victor 310, 315

SNJC Holdings 51, 91

Snow, Dorothy 89

Sorkin, Richard 102, 140, 329

Sotheby’s 79-81, 102, 132, 270, 288

Southern Air Transport 96, 235, 237-239, 241, 243, 244, 254, 258, 260
Southern Trust 370, 371

Southmark (conglomerate) 39, 40, 43, 63, 64
Space Relations 3

SpaceX $5, 340, 355

Spence, Craig $8

Spielberg, Steven 125, 205, 217, 218

Spizer, Scott 4

Stahl, Leslie 186

Starlink 342

Starr, Ken 185, 216

Stein, Andrew 222

Steinberg, Jonah 38, 118, 350, 351
Steinhardt, Michael 125-127, 140
Steinhardt, Sol “Red McGee” 126

Stein, Julius Caesar 103, 222
Stephanopoulos, George 182, 221

Stephens Inc. 188, 190, 193, 211

Stephens, Jackson 17, 181, 188, 190, 193, 209, 211
Stephens, Trae 361

Stewart, James 55, 56, 340

Stock, Ann 173, 189, 213

Stone, Linda 334, 339, 354

Stratton, Deidre 285

Sultan of Brunei 18, 30, 36, 305, 306, 316
Summers, Larry 117, 121, 205, 283, 342, 347
Sunday Times 152, 163, 166, 29S, 297, 314, 320, 349, 351
Sunderland, Julie 347

Sun Valley Conference 336, 354

Supermob 125, 132

Sydney Morning Herald 65, 147, 167, 229
Systematics 181-184, 186-188, 190, 193
Szall, Edward 12, 17, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36

T

Tackett, Daniel 13

Tai, Elizabeth 269

Tamco Holding Co. 37, 38, 39, 46
Tamir, Yossi 120, 139

Task Force 157 47, 140

Taubman, Adolph Alfred 72, 73, 76-82,
Tawill, Eliot 361

Teledesic 342

Tenet, George 129

Tennant, Anthony 81

TerraMar Project 243, 313, 345
Terrorism Information Awareness 365
Tesla 55, 57, 67, 340

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Thatcher, Margaret 15, 132, 144, 210

Thatcher, Mark 15

The Israel Project (TIP) 134

The Limited 30, 43, ZL, 72, 88, 94, 95, 97-99, 110, 114, 122, 235, 236-243
Thiel, Peter 361, 362, 365-367

Thinking Machines Corporation 56, 333, 353

Thomas, Gordon 35, 46, 64, 129, 152, 155, 167, 258, 262, 326
Thomasson, Patsy 178

Thornton, Andrew C. II 20, 34

301 66th Stree 53, 55, 57, 214, 266, 267
Tienken, Richard 218

TIME 140
Tisch, Laurence 72, 125, 155, 186
Toka 286

Tome, Giuseppe 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 32

Tom, Maeley 192

Total Information Awareness (TIA) 364-367, 374, 377
Tower, John 153, 154

Trafficante, Santo 93

Trie, Yah Lin “Charlie” 192, 196,-207, 218, 246-250, 254
Trilateral Commission 61, 121, 132, 243, 260

Triplett, William III 15, 33, 244, 245, 260

Trireme Partners 134

Trudeau, Justin 123

Trump, Donald 3, 18, 20, 24, 34, 35, 47-
214, 224, 231, 265, 274, 283, 294, 31

Trump, Melania 50, 148, 283

TRW Inc. 12, 13

Turner, Stanley 60, 68

66, 24, 10S, 140, 148, 165, 166,

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Union Bank of Switzerland 184

Unit 8200 322, 331, 360, 361, 376

United Brands 77, 78, 81, 82

United Dye 175

United Fruit 77, 101

United Israel Appeal 83, 84, 111, 112, 114, 217
United Jewish Appeal 9, 74, 77, 83, 84, 103, 114, 217
U.S. News & World Report 121

V

Valentine, Douglas 376

Vanity Fair 2, Š, 6, 9, LL, 17, 29, 31, 33, 67, 98, 105, 106, 156, 164, 167, 168, 216,
222, 232, 233, 249, 261, 268, 276, 288, 334, 353

Vasquez, Marita 266

Vedmore, Johnny 135, 351, 376, 378

Verint 130, 331, 361

Vest, Jason 133, 141, 262

Victoria's Secret 50, 105, 106, 139, 265, 268-270, 284, 287, 288, 346

Villard Houses 29, 30, 47, 99, 266, 306

Vogelman, Uzi 120, 139

Volcker, Paul 132

Volscho, Thomas 2, 31

Von Damm, Helene 25

Von Hoffman, Nicholas 33, 35

von Trapp, Debra 185
Vulcan 327

W

Wade, Alan 364-369, 377

Walker, Melanie 270, 284-286, 291, 2

Wallace, Mike 186

Wall Street Journal 67, 124, 125, 128, 139, 155, 156, 168, 183, 224, 352

Walmart 211, 212

Walsh, Frank 53, 64, 92, 94, 95

Walters, Bill 44

Walters, Gary 180

Walton, Alice 211, 212, 231

Warbasse, Naomi 208

Ward, Vicky 5, 10, 11, 16, 28, 29, 31, 56, 61, 67, 106, 216, 232, 313, 318

Warner, Marvin 14, 52, 103, 163, 224, 321

Washington Post 15, 16, 24, 26-29, 33, 35, 48, 60, 65, 66, 68, 127, 140, 169, 179,
205, 209, 216, 218, 225, 228-232, 244, 260, 261, 290

Washington Times 155

Wasserman, Lew 125, 140, 153, 196, 205, 217, 308, 309

Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, The 366, 367, 377, 378

Webb, Gary 20

WEF Young Global Leader 286, 346

Weinberger, Caspar 183, 184, 377

Weinstein, Harvey 322, 328, 349

Weschler, Harry 184

Wexner, Abigail 97, 121, 122, 135

Wexner, Bella 71, 98, 99, 110, 137

Wexner Foundation 54, 84, 98, 99, 104, 109-117, 119, 121, 122, 126, 134, 135,
137-139, 173, 232

Wexner, Harry and Bella 71

Wexner Investment Company 51, 89-91, 99, 11

Wexner, Leslie, 16, 24, 30, 40, 43, 47, 48, 50-54, 57, 59, 61, 71-74, ZZ 79-81, 83,
84, 88-100, 103-105, 107-122, 124-126, 129, 131-142, 155, 156, 172, 173,

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175, 189, 217, 218, 221, 232, 235, 238-243, 253, 254, 258, 263, 268, 270, 281,

284, 286, 288, 319, 336, 351

Wexner’s Heritage Program (WHP) 114, 115

WEC Corporation 93, 172, 190, 224

White, Gordon 150

White House Historical Association 173, 174, 180, 186, 188

Wien, Lawrence 175, 224

Williams, Maggie 178, 204

Wilson, Edwin 47, 333

Winokur, Herbert S. “Pug” Jr. 79, 80

Wired 162, 170, 267, 287, 324, 342, 343, 349, 355, 376

Wise, Barbara Alice 208

Wolff, Michael 49, 65, 167

Wolfson, Harry 117

World Bank 47, 117, 286

World Economic Forum 115, 122, 123, 139, 286, 291, 305, 316, 331, 332, 346,
352, 356

World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders (YGL) program 115, 122, 123

World Health Organization 286, 346, 347

World Jewish Congress 24, 59

World Zionist Organization (WZO 83

Worthen Bank 191

Wraxall Group 13, 14, 33

Wright, Claudia 323, 350

Wright, Les 88, 91

Wyatt, Petronella 144, 166

Wynn, Eric 218

Y Yamada, Tachi 343

Yassenoff, Frank 86, 87, 95

Yassenoff, Solly 86

Yellen, Janet 342

Yozma (program) 321, 322, 331, 349, 352

Z

Zabludowicz, Shlomo and Chaim 133
Zacks, Gordon 83

Zapata Petroleum 51, 102

Zell, Sam 38

Zemurray, Samuel 77

Zhan, Keshi 199

Zhu Gao Feng 206, 251

Ziffren, Paul 308

Zinni, Anthony 134, 142

Zolnai, Stephen Martin $5, 67

Zorro Ranch 275, 285, 299, 341, 346
Zuckerberg, Mark 340

Zuckerman, Mort 61, 121, 227
Zukerman, Pinchas 2

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABC - American Broadcasting Corporation

AFIP — Armed Forces Institute of Pathology

AIPAC - American Israel Public Affairs Committee
AISI - Automated Intelligence Systems Inc

APAC - Asian Pacific Advisory Council

A.R. Corp — Aeroflot/Rickenbacker

BCCHK - Bank of Credit and Commerce Hong Kong
BCCI - Bank of Credit and Commerce International
BCCIHK - Bank of Credit and Commerce International Hong Kong
BONY - Bank of New York

CBS - Columbia Broadcasting System

CGI - Clinton Global Initiative

CJF — Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds
COSCO - China Ocean Shipping Company

CPL - Center for Public Leadership

DEVCO - Grand Bahama Development Corporation
DNC - Democratic National Committee

ENESCO - Energy Systems Company

ERA - Electronic Realty Associates Inc

FBO - fixed-based operators

FDLE - Florida Department of Law Enforcement
GMT - GeoMiliTech

IDC - Intercontinental Diversified Corp

IPFCA - International Police and Fire Chaplains Association
ITA - International Trade Administration

ITM - Integrated Transaction Management

MC/MPA - Mid-Career Master of Public Administration
NEC — National Economic Council

NED - National Endowment for Democracy
Norinco — North Industries Corporation
NYU - New York University

ONG - Oklahoma Natural Gas

PLA - People’s Liberation Army

PNAC - Project for a New American Century
RMO - Remote Mortgage Origination

TIP - The Israel Project

UAE - United Arab Emirates

UJA - United Jewish Appeal

WEC - World Finance Corporation

WHP - Wexner’s Heritage Program

WZO - World Zionist Organization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Be and foremost, I'd like to extend my deepest and sincerest thanks to Ed
Berger, without whom this book would not have been possible. Ed
contributed amazing, in-depth and original research to several key parts of this
book and his contributions were and are invaluable. If you enjoy historical deep
dives about the intersection of organized crime networks, corporate power and
intelligence agencies, please consider listening to and supporting his podcast: The
Pseudodoxology Podcast Network at https://www.patreon.com/wydna

I also want to thank my amazing assistant Star Parsons for helping keep my
website afloat while I worked on this book and for painstakingly formatting all the
many, many citations within this book. I also owe much to my publisher Kris
Millegan for his infinite patience and understanding, as this book was delayed
several times, and for his support of my work. Also, an important thank you to
Johnny Vedmore who made some important contributions to this book and
whose original past reporting on the Epstein case was key to developing
important parts of this book.

In addition, this work, and my journalistic career in general, would not have
been possible if not for Mnar Muhawesh and the team at MintPress News. Mnar
and the MintPress team first gave me the space and platform necessary to develop
my journalistic work and provided me with the support I needed to publish my
original, four-part series on which this book is based. Thank you so much for
believing in me and for supporting my work from the very beginning — I owe you
all so much.

I also would like to thank my amazing babysitters, Fresia Retamal and Patricia
Guzman, for taking great care of my little ones so that I could put in the time to
write this book.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my deepest, heartfelt thanks to all of
my supporters, specifically the thousands of readers who financially support my
work, allowing me to be 100% independent. Without your support, this book
would not have happened and I cannot thank you enough for your help in

financing this book as well as in supporting and sharing my other work, both
online and in print.

Exposes vastly under-explored topics compared to
other media reports and books on Jeffrey Epstein

ow did Jeffrey Epstein manage to evade justice for

decades? Who enabled him and why? Why were legal

officials told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and
to back off during his first arrest in the mid-2000s?

Volume 2 of One Nation Under Blackmail examines the rise of
Jeffrey Epstein and his closest associates, such as Leslie Wexner
and Ghislaine Maxwell, and contextualizes them within the
organized crime-intelligence networks detailed in-depth in Volume

1. It subsequently details their ties, with a focus on Epstein, to
intelligence networks, espionage activity and the subversion of
American institutions as well as the role of Epstein and the Maxwell
family in the evolution of blackmail in the digital era.

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